February 28, 2005
I Love the '80s! East Village Style! Exhibition at New Museum Revisits Legendary NYC Art Scene!
Hey, Everybody! It's the Eighties! At least for two full floors of cavernous envy-inducing loft space at the temporary home in Chelsea of the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York. That's where we recently caught the other current buzz NYC exhibition (Christo's The Gates at Central Park being the buzz exhibition), titled East Village USA. If you can manage it, you should definitely check out this show before it closes March 19.
The curator for East Village USA has produced a definitive art collection that features the work of some of the best known figures of the downtown New York art scene between 1980 and 1987. It was in the many small galleries and event spaces of the East Village, which at the height of the art boom could be counted in the hundreds, where many of the artists whose work is shown here first gained critical acclaim and, for a few, enormous commercial success and international fame.
Futura, Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Mark Kostabi, Ann Magnuson, and the influential art-post-punk/indie rock band Sonic Youth were some of the important and more widely known creators to come out the era. The show is includes of lot of the first art to emerge from--or to be directly influenced by--early hip-hop culture: graffiti and street art, painting, film, music and and dance.
Of course, in terms of art, the East Village today is a shadow of its former self; the nabe has gentrified to the point where it's now a place where the word "luxury" describes apartments selling for millions of dollars. Sure, there are still signs, however, of the area's historic importance as the center of American radical bohemianism, both artistic and political. The East Village no longer attracts artists because they've simply been priced out.
The current artists' magnet of NYC is Williamsburg in Brooklyn, which lies directly across the East River from the East Village. But Williamsburg doesn't possess quite the same vibe--the hood is a relatively sedate and mostly residential area without the history of severe urban decay, violence and drugs that was once the edgy hallmark of life in the East Village and Lower East Side. What's more, because Williamsburg is in Brooklyn, it isn't as directly affected by the hyper-urban bustle of Manhattan.
Still, there are now dozens upon dozens of art galleries and hundreds of artists' studios in W'burg that we won't be surprised to see twenty years from now an exhibition at the New Museum called "Williamsburg USA."
That said, the New Museum of Contemporary Art is fittingly moving into its new, permanent home next year in a futuristic building designed by avant-garde Japanese arhitects on the Bowery in the Lower East Side, at the heart of where much of the art of East Village USA was originally conceived and created.
Related Links
The New Museum of Cntemporary Art Website
Posted by at February 28, 2005 01:48 AM
