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New Spirit, New Sculpture, New Money: Art in the 1980s

New Spirit, New Sculpture, New Money: Art in the 1980s
Library Shelf Location 03.CORK
Publication Date 16 May 2003
Description Richard Cork is one of the most serious, most influential and best-informed art critics writing about art in Britain today. These four volumes comprise a selection of his art criticism taken from the last thirty years. Despite being taken from the seemingly ephemeral newspaper reviews of exhibitions, the result is a fascinating chronicle and invaluable record of a turbulent period that gives an overview and survey of British art and its reception over the last thirty years which is unprecedented in its scope. The 1980s began with an aggressive attempt to reassert the old dominance of painting, but a major exhibition in London, A New Spirit in Painting, included some, like Per Kirkeby and A.R. Penck, who regarded paint on canvas as only one way of working among many. It also gave prominence to a range of figurative painters exploring fresh territory. Artists as substantial as Georg Baselitz and Anselm Keifer finally began to receive the attention they deserved. The decade also witnessed a flowering of art by women. An impressive number, including Helen Chadwich, Shirazeh Houshiery, Madgalena Jetolova, Cindy Sherman and Alison Wilding, played a distinguished part in the vitality of the new art. Meanwhile, interest grew in work beyond the familiar Euro-American boundaries, particularly from Africa, Bangladesh, the Caribbean, India and Japan. Cork also explores the wildly excessive reputation-making of the 1980s, spurred on by inflated prices in an ominously overheated market, and charts the decline of New York’s dominance of the art world. The 1980s coincided with a dramatic resurgence of interest in sculptural activity. A new generation, among them Tony Cragg, Richard Deacon, Antony Gormley, Anish Kapoor and Bill Woodrow, discovered the freedom to deploy a wealth of images and references excluded from sculpture a decade before. Responsive to many of the most memorable emergent artists of the 1980s, Cork welcomed the fresh energy channelled into working beyond the confines of the gallery, and he hit out passionately at the threat to art education, the imposition of museum entry charges and other destructive aspects of ‘the Orwellian decade’. Writing in Time Out, Mark Haworth-Booth praised Cork as ‘a committed, attacking and articulate writer’. Those qualities are well to the fore throughout this immensely readable and stimulating book.
ISBN 9780300095098
Quantity 1
Pages 320
Author Richard Cork
Format Paperback
Publisher Yale University Press, New Haven and London
Category Surveys of Modern & Contemporary Art
Keyword 1980s
Related Country/Global Region Britain/UK
Artist's Nationality British/UK
Language English

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