Ah, 2008 was the year of Obama. D'oh, it was also the year of the recession. From the inspiring president-elect to the sobering new reality, here are the top 5 trends in art in 2008.
1. Artists Heart Obama
Artists have often rallied around political causes, but this year the cause had a face and a name: Barack Obama. It was street artist Shepard Fairey who got the ball rolling, stenciling the now-president-elect’s face in red, white, and blue with the word “Progress” — later changed to “Hope” — underneath. The icon soon became famous and turned into one of the most ubiquitous images of our time.
After that, so many limited-edition prints and auctions for Obama followed suit that it was hard to keep up. Fairey teamed up with MoveOn.org to create a pop-up gallery devoted to art for Obama during the Democratic National Convention in Denver. And the celebration hardly stopped once Obama won: Fairey placed his famous portrait of the president-elect at the center of a new victory design, which was quickly printed on stickers, more limited-edition prints, and posters, while Elizabeth Peyton added a portrait of future First Lady Michelle Obama to her retrospective at the New Museum. Will the Obama lovefest continue once he’s safely sworn in, or will artists have to find a new cause? We’ll just have to wait and see.
2.
The Russians Are Coming. Are the Russians Coming?
The Russians are coming. In 2008, this cry, which in decades past signaled (the paranoia of) a communist invasion, came to herald the arrival of the latest class of deep-pocketed art-world financiers. As the year began, the expression might have been tinged with resentment (nouveau riche billionaire oligarchs driving up auction prices), but as 2008 rounded the halfway mark the cry was one of hope (could billionaire oligarchs rescue a teetering art market?). Among the highlights of the Russian year in art: the record-setting auction prices paid for works by Bacon and Koons by Roman Abramovich; the opening of CCCM, aka the Garage, a new art space run by it-girl Dasha Zhukova, who also happens to be Abramovich’s companion; the multi-venue Ilya Kabakov retrospective, the first major exhibition of the most expensive living Russian artist in the country of his birth; and the temporary exhibition in Moscow organized by uberdealer Larry Gagosian, whose gallery admitted to doing half its business with Russians. Alas, by year’s end, one had the sense that that the Russian art moment had passed, with cascading stock markets freezing activity in the local art market and rumors of the postponement of a highly anticipated wedding dashing, or at least delaying, dreams of a new Camelot in Moscow.
3.
Museums Show Their Feminine Side
Things have certainly improved for women artists in the past couple decades, but they haven’t gotten so good that the sheer number of major exhibitions this year, particularly in New York, hasn’t felt like a major coup. Louise Bourgeois and Catherine Opie overlapped at the Guggenheim this fall, and on view right now are Mary Heilmann and Elizabeth Peyton at the New Museum and Marlene Dumas and Pipilotti Rist at MoMA. And it’s not just New York, either: Tara Donovan, who had an installation at the Met earlier this year, now has her first major museum retrospective at ICA, Boston; Bourgeois’s tour includes L.A. MOCA, the Tate, the Pompidou, and the Hirshhorn; and Peyton’s going to Whitechapel in London, Bonnefanten in Maastricht, and the Walker in Minneapolis, which has had a slew of its own offerings this year, including shows by Trisha Brown and JoAnn Verburg. We could get used to this.
4.
Unmonumental Everything
This year, the Whitney Biennial curators offered the Beckettian term “lessness” to describe the Zeitgeist reflected in their exhibition. The term well describes one of the most ubiquitous trends of the year, thanks (or perhaps no thanks) to the New Museum’s inaugural exhibition, “Unmonumental” (which ran through April 9). Presenting three floors of abject found-object sculpture, the exhibition confirmed the lackadaisical, grabbed-it-from-the-sidewalk style as a movement worthy of institutional branding. Soon unmonumental art was everywhere you looked, but even this was not enough to halt the trend — no, sheets of cardboard and droopy carpet scraps continued to appear in gallery after gallery, often sporting a little ripped-out found image from an old magazine to give a hint of enigma. Add some Venetian blinds and a cylinder of faded foam, and you can re-create 2008 on your sidewalk, absolutely free.
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