This was the year the art world took another large step away from the legacy of the 1980s.
The first and most decisive move occurred when the art market collapsed in 1990. That indicated the time of mindless gorging-at mindless prices-had come to an end.
Emphasis stayed on the market for two years because during the ’80s the market had created several of the stars in contemporary art, and high prices had given them validity.
When the market fell, so did a number of artists’ reputations. But it took time for anyone to determine whether the dip would mean just a few bad months or a Great Depression.
This year anyone looking carefully could pick up signs that a number of the big-name artists of the ’80s-Robert Longo, David Salle, Julian Schnabel, Jeff Koons-had begun to create a little embarrassment.
The ’80s represented narcissistic indulgence. The ’90s uphold-publicly, at least-social conscience. And so, quickened aesthetically by “the pulse of this new day,” museum curators have pretty much turned their backs on artists of the Age of Boesky, at times filling their storerooms with mistakes that only a few years before had entered the collections as masterpieces.
Early speculators in the work and dealers who benefited from its inflation are, of course, still smiling. First, because the market rise of boom time was high enough to make the (much smaller) fall bearable. And, second, because museums may well take doubtful work off view for a while, but the fact that the work is in a museum means it automatically will one day be revived, to possibly even greater acclaim than at its beginning.
In any case, there’s plenty of time for a whole series of critical reversals, given that the most visible art stars of the last decade achieved fame while still in their late 20s or early 30s. As artists go, they were extremely young. And in the great years of the market, younger nearly always meant better.
This is the point that in 1993 received the strongest challenge. The autumn museum season of a decade ago brought some retrospectives for artists just above and below age 30. But now curators generally give young artists smaller spaces and more selective shows that remain part of a museum’s responsibility yet clearly are no longer the main attraction.
It is as if to say the error of the ’80s lay in focusing on youth rather than on any specific young artists. This alienates neither the collectors who gave museums pieces by the artists nor the dealers who often cut prices on the artists’ works to enable museums to buy them.
Everybody knows about youthful folly. No one need blame any artist for having committed it. Better to leave curators to adjust to the attitudes of the ’90s on their own.
One way they have done it has been simply to step back onto safer ground, by moving up the age of artists they choose to emphasize.
A recent example was the first exhibition in the new space for contemporary work at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. The enlarged and renovated museum opened nine years ago with a special group exhibition that included many young artists and appeared to show greater commitment to art of our period.
At the same time, however, the amount of space allotted to contemporary art on a permanent basis was relatively small. So the criticism about never doing enough continued until last summer, when Kirk Varnedoe, director of paintings and sculpture, reinstalled the modern collection to create a much larger space for contemporary art and, in the autumn, devoted most of it to a single painter.
A decade ago, this significant a gesture might easily have gone in the direction of one of the thirtysomething hotshots. But the artist whose work appeared was Robert Ryman, who, at 63, has had a high reputation since the 1970s, a period that now looks to many as the last with sanity and rigor.
When Richard Francis arrived in Chicago last year to become chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art, he said: “I am interested in rethinking figures of the ’70s and the ’80s. I think specifically of artists like (Bruce) Nauman, artists of that caliber, artists who have created work challenging in all ways-intellectual, physical and emotional.”
Nauman is 52. His wife, painter Susan Rothenberg-whom the MCA showed in a large retrospective this year-is 48. Ilya Kabakov, another recent exhibitor, is 60. And 1993’s major group shows at the MCA were for the Pop art and Fluxus movements, whose chief members are closer in age to 70.
This kind of re-examination more strongly dominated the latest installment of the oldest and most discussed contemporary art exposition in the world, the Biennale, in Venice, Italy.
Group exhibitions focused on tendencies from the ’20s, ’30s, ’50s and ’60s. John Cage and Francis Bacon received memorial shows. Pavilions displayed works by such veterans as Louise Bourgeois, Richard Hamilton, Yayoi Kusama, Nam June Paik, Antoni Tapies, and the 90-year-old George Zongolopoulos.
Whatever one thought of the art, clearly the choice of exhibitors reflected on an international scale a return to artists of long experience-which, in itself, was not a bad thing, though the focus certainly was different from any of the Biennales of the last 10 years.
Should an emphasis on more proven artists continue in our expositions and museums, some will say it is a sign of woeful cultural conservatism. But, of course, it can signify something else entirely, something more promising: The idea that age and experience often give a depth generally absent from work created by the young.
