You are now subscribed
Your newsletter sign-up was successful
Want to add more newsletters?
Daily (Mon-Sun)
Daily Digest
Sign up for global news and reviews, a Wallpaper* take on architecture, design, art & culture, fashion & beauty, travel, tech, watches & jewellery and more.
Monthly, coming soon
The Rundown
A design-minded take on the world of style from Wallpaper* fashion features editor Jack Moss, from global runway shows to insider news and emerging trends.
Monthly, coming soon
The Design File
A closer look at the people and places shaping design, from inspiring interiors to exceptional products, in an expert edit by Wallpaper* global design director Hugo Macdonald.
The 1980s: the decade of decadence, power shoulders, big hair, big bucks and Generation X. As the biggest ad agencies of the era – among them Saatchi & Saatchi, the WPP group – ate up the smaller fish becoming huge conglomerates, and cable TV arrived, commercial culture began to cut its teeth.
Meanwhile in New York, a group of young, gung-ho artists responded to the insatiable consumerism with art that both attacked and absorbed advertising aesthetics and its politics. Artists like Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger, and Richard Prince, were at the forefront, often appropriating their material directly from adverts.
Installation view of ‘Brand New: Art and Commodity in the 1980s’ at Hirshhorn Museum with New! New Too! (pictured right), 1983, by Jeff Koons, lithograph billboard mounted on cotton. © Jeff Koons
Their approach quickly spread across the country and abroad. ‘What began as satire quickly grew to become a defining moment in contemporary art,’ says Gianni Jetzer, curator of ‘Brand New: Art and Commodity in the 1980s’, at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC – an exhibition exploring art and artists’ relationship to commodity and commerce. Focusing on works made in the 1980s by more than 70 artists, the show serves up a slice of eighties ideology on a plate of trenchant criticism of the socio-economic system.
Many of them haven’t lost their acuity. Thirty years after it originally appeared in 1988, Krzysztof Wodiczko’s iconic, 68ft projection onto the façade (pictured below) of the Hirshhorn Museum is being restaged. The work, the artist reflects, is ‘strangely familiar and at once unbearably relevant’. In it, imagery spliced from ads, films and newspaper headlines in the US at the time – abortion and death penalty laws – floats imposingly above visitors’ heads, a comment on way mass media manipulates us all.
Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC, 1988, by Krzysztof Wodiczko, public projection on the façade of the museum. The installation has been recreated for the 2018 exhibition. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Lelong, New York
It was also in the 1980s that artists, perhaps for the first time, had to face up to the place of their art as part of a market; the physical art object was now something to acquire and own, with buyers lusting for next big thing.
Though this movement defined, in many ways, the way artists work today, (see the new Netflix exposé of the art world, Blurred Lines, for proof). ‘This phenomenon of artist as a brand identity, and the art object as commodity, has not yet been examined at this scale,’ Jetzer notes.
Installation view of ‘Brand New: Art and Commodity in the 1980s’ at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.
Untitled (I shop therefore I am), 1987, by Barbara Kruger, photographic silkscreen on vinyl. © Barbara Kruger, Mary Boone Gallery, New York.
Untitled #121, 1983, by Cindy Sherman, chromogenic colour print, New York
Installation view of ‘Brand New: Art and Commodity in the 1980s’ at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.
These Galleries show no more than 10% women artists or none at all., 1984-85, by Guerrilla Girls, offset lithograph,Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC, Smithsonian Institution
Installation view of ‘Brand New: Art and Commodity in the 1980s’ at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.
Installation view of ‘Brand New: Art and Commodity in the 1980s’ at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.
Homeless Vehicle in New York City, 1988-89, by Krzysztof Wodiczko, colour photographs, New York
Alex Gonzalez Loves his Mother and Father, 1989, by Ken Lum, chromogenic print on sintra, mounted on acrylic sheet with screen printed ink text. Courtesy of the artist. Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam
INFORMATION
‘Brand New: Art and Commodity in the 1980s’ is on view until 13 May. For more information, visit the Hirshorn Museum
ADDRESS
Hirshhorn Museum
Independence Avenue and 7th Street
Washington DC 20560