David Lee
September/October 2020
A watershed moment in the official story of art has been reached. Unlike in the first decades of the last century, when experimental isms followed one another annually, the first decades of the 21st have until now seen no signal change in direction or emphasis: recently, in contemporary art we’ve been living through a period of dreary status quo.
My lifetime has witnessed few moments of paradigm shift. Pop and
Op were the first I was aware of. They were part of the same liberating ethos
nginx
of the ’60s as The Beatles, Emma Peel and drugs. I became aware of the new visual age at boarding school when, in 1964, our dorm curtains were swapped from drab to a bright pattern of pastel bubbles, like magnified spittle – we had nowt like them in Manchester. Ten years later, when ‘sculptors’ started hiking and burying themselves, Conceptualism swept Pop away. There were no criteria for judging this baffling stuff, we simply accepted it on the supposedly better informed say-so of
those who were, one way or another, flogging it to us. Like all allegedly avant-garde developments it was written about in code and as though it was the only thing in existence. Then, in the early ’90s, came the yBas with their publicity seeking and a clapped out recapitulation of Duchamp and Warhol. This frivolous Opportunism was still really just boring old Conceptualism, but at least it had its tits out. Alas, the gene pool of Opportunism was limited, its few ideas