How are we to write the history of the art of the last ten years? Better yet, do we really need to? At the end of every decade there's a natural impulse to survey it. This one was no exception. Within the last eighteen months, there have been no less than three major eighties-in-review exhibitions in various parts of the country.
These exhibitions were revealing not for what they told us about developments in art in the preceding decade - which was very little - but more for what they said about the dubious necessity of mounting such exhibitions and the problems inherent in doing so. Chief among these is the fact that after five Whitney Biennial exhibitions, the ground to be covered in a decade survey is anything but unfamiliar-surely the primary reason to mount such exhibitions.
Assembling Exhibitions
More seriously, there is the troubling issue of perpetuating the status quo in such exhibitions. It is - or is supposed to be - the task of a curator to bring to the business of assembling exhibitions a disinterested viewpoint, one capable of making discriminating judgments about the quality of the work under review. In addition, such a viewpoint should provide us with an interpretation of the period that, while it may not willfully overturn established notions of what went on, at least makes some attempt to tell us something new about it. But the last thing any of the curators seemed to be after for these three exhibitions was divergent opinion. The point of the exercise these days is to reinforce, not deviate from, established critical orthodoxies and notions of value.
While inadvertently pointing up some of these problems, these recent surveys have told us a great deal about the contemporary art world-the state of our museums, the ideas that are valued, and the character of the contemporary museum curator.
All these problems and more were concentrated in a single exhibition, Cultural and Commentary: An Eighties Perspective, on view this spring at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. It contained almost all the familiar names from the eighties - at least all the familiar names of a certain type. Julian Schnabel was there, as were Cindy Sherman, Jeff Koons, Jenny Holzer, and British sculptor Tony Cragg. Francisco Clemente was also on the roster, along with Laurie Anderson, Robert Gober, and Sherrie Levine, these last two having collaborated on an installation.
Socially Critical
The most obvious failing of the exhibition - aside from the low-level quality of the work - was that it was simply too narrow. A great deal happened in the eighties, though it was simply too narrow. A great deal happened in the eighties, though it was hardly a golden age. But the only kind of art that is of interest to day's decade-in-review organizers is "socially critical" art-in other words, art that tries to make some sort of political statement, usually left wing.
So it was here. To Kathy Halbreich, curator of contemporary art at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and organizer of the Hirshhorn show, the most important art produced in the eighties was the kind that, in her view, was influenced by events outside
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