“Every Future Has A Price: 30 Years After Infotainment” Exhibition

“Every Future Has A Price: 30 Years After Infotainment” Exhibition

Elizabeth Dee

This event has ended.

Elizabeth Dee presents the second exhibition of this season, Every Future Has a Price: 30 Years After Infotainment.

The original exhibition, Infotainment, was organized by Anne Livet, in close collaboration with artists and co-founders of the gallery Nature Morte, Peter Nagy and Alan Belcher, and was a legendary intellectual appraisal of an interrelated East Village gallery scene in the 1980s. Infotainment argued for a generation of artists who adhered to neither Neo-expressionist painting nor the direct repurposing of images by the Pictures Generation, but instead imbued their content with social and philosophical resonance. Inheritors of 1960s Conceptualism, these artists worked with increased stylization, transference of images, appropriation and subversion of authorship in favor of that which relates to media, television and advertising, thus furthering the dialogue of the Pictures Generation artists through strategies arguably more relevant to the social and political time of the 1980s.

Every Future Has a Price: 30 Years After Infotainment takes its name from Ronald Jones’ critical essay for ZG, indicating consideration of both the original Infotainment exhibition and its broader context. He writes, in a sentence equally applicable to our own time, “Wall Street is a weird modern morality play that came to the screen just as prison doors were closing on real corporate raiders, and the intricate bridgework invented between avarice and ethics by the “me” generation had been reworked so many times that it was beginning to look like a bunch of loose ends.”

Ever relevant today, the current exhibition examines forgotten connections in the art world of the 1980s and the art market that came soon after in New York. This moment, commonly regarded as one of the most important times in American post-war art of the last 40 years, can be linked back to shows such as Infotainment that were organized informally between artists, galleries and theorists. Collins and Milazzo, and others who regularly wrote for the curated shows reflecting the time, helped develop a language around the generation as their work was being produced.

Infotainment was never shown locally in New York, yet traveled to Texas Gallery (Houston), Rhona Hoffman Gallery (Chicago) and Aspen Art Museum (Aspen), as well as internationally to European venues from 1985-1987. The exhibition will include 11 original works from the Infotainment show and catalogue, shown in this context for the first time in New York, such as Rectangular Cell with Conduit by Peter Halley and Un-Color Becomes Alter Ego by Haim Steinbach, as well as an expanded checklist of more than 30 artists from the original 17.

Every Future Has a Price will include (*indicates original to Infotainment): Dennis Adams, Alan Belcher*, Gretchen Bender*, Ashley Bickerton, Jennifer Bolande*, Sarah Charlesworth*, Clegg & Guttman*, Jessica Diamond*, Jack Goldstein, Group Material, Guerrilla Girls, Howard Halle, Peter Halley*, Ronald Jones, Kevin Larmon*, Thomas Lawson, Annette Lemieux, Sherrie Levine, Robert Longo, Frank Majore, Richard Milani*, Peter Nagy*, Joseph Nechvatal*, Cady Noland, Joel Otterson*, Steven Parrino*, Richard Prince, David Robbins*, Walter Robinson, Cindy Sherman, Laurie Simmons*, Haim Steinbach*, Philip Taaffe, Meyer Vaisman, Julia Wachtel*, Wallace and Donohue, Oliver Wasow, James Welling and Christopher Wool.

Media

• Painting

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