During the Reagan years our economy was on steroids.  We were getting our first injection from the personal computer business and video game markets as well as the rich got extra rich with the slashing of the capital gains tax, which ultimately led to the bankruptcy of America by displacing the burden of funding the government from business and the wealthy investor to Joe six-pack. Not everyone remembers the hay day in the eighties Art World.  What a lot of folks don’t remember is the abandonment of a renaissance period and replacement with the antithesis of the period in the 90’s.  The eighties was a balls out Billboard sized extravaganza of art created out of the collision of the Cal Arts Mafia and the Sherman/Longo crew; this coupled with art writers who were exploring the relationship of making connections between French theory and objects they witnessed in the salons.  The word of the era was Iconoclastic.  The reality was larger than life.  Think of how many artists who we’re discovered and exhibited during this time.  The list is long and deep.  Some are firmly in place, Blue Chips if you will.  Others fell out of grace and hide in obscure places.

Which leads me to a key point I would like you to think about; and that is:  Is art history only made during a booming economy?  Because I can list an army of artists from the eighties but not so many from the nineties.   Same thing with the 40's and the 60’s come to think of it.  But just for arguments sake lets say it is true.  What then?  Is one doomed at the outset just because when they turn 24 or 25 with their MFA in hand a body of work at their side because of a recession?   At least Van Gogh made a large body of work before he passed on.  During the late seventies and early 80’s there was an art school out by Magic Mountain that had some as well.  Magic, that is.  It had a solid sense of what it was and they turned the Art world upside down.  They we’re able to do this by implementing a curriculum that emphasized the appropriation of various aesthetics while illustrating a hodge-podge of French critical theory. To get an idea of how deep the list goes here is a small sampling; Mike Kelley, Julian Schnabel, Jack Goldstein, Lari Pittman, and David Salle.

Now when Goldstein and crew met up with Longo and the gang; this underground movement had made it to the main stage in a really big way.  That’s right I said it, underground.  Longo was a cab driver and Goldstein was a museum security guard.  Two likely characters in a Hollywood action movie to pull off a heist in the New York Art World.  Yet these two did it with their work not through an unempathetic greed induced extravaganza.  Well, unless you count Johnny Mnemonic.  What I mean to say is that High Art really peaked in the eighties.  That eighties movement was predicated on corporate sponsorship and the utilization of specialized skilled craftsmen orchestrated by the artist in order to create a finish fetish perfectly sound object.