Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC
February 2018
February 14–May 13, 2018
It’s the 1980s as you’ve never seen them before: the iconic decade when artwork became a commodity and the artist, a brand. Razor-sharp, witty, satirical, and deeply subversive, this exhibition of nearly 150 works examined the origins and rise of a new generation of artists in New York who blurred the lines among art, entertainment, and commerce, a shift that continues to define contemporary art today.
This expansive exhibition presented a fresh and focused history of the decade, bringing together rarely displayed works from US and European collections for the first time since the 1980s. The artists included some of today’s most influential figures: Ashley Bickerton, Sarah Charlesworth, Jessica Diamond, Peter Halley, Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Levine, Joel Otterson, Richard Prince, Erika Rothenberg, Haim Steinbach, Meyer Vaisman, and Julia Wachtel, as well as artist collectives and projects such as ACT UP Gran Fury, The Offices, General Idea, Fashion Moda, and Guerrilla Girls.
Year by year, Brand New traced major artistic developments alongside the corresponding events that shaped the 1980s, such as the introduction of MTV, Reaganomics, financial crises, gentrification, and the height of the AIDS crisis. It also documented new collaborations taking place during this period, when artists came together to form their own complex commercial entities. These artist-run consultancies, aesthetic “service providers,” and pop-up storefronts redefined how art could be made and sold.
Brand New: Art and Commodity in the 1980s is accompanied by an exhibition catalogue. This groundbreaking book tells the story of the evolution of New York’s downtown art scene in the 1980s—from a DIY counterculture in the East Village to a legitimate gallery business in SoHo. Coinciding with the rise of modern branding and the onset of the information age, artists’ focus on commodities and consumerism began as satire but came to be much more complex: commodities and associated phenomena, such as advertising, now served as vessels for ideas, politics, and personal relationships in “brand-new” types of painting, sculpture, photography, installation, and performance.
Learn more at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.