Problems with the 1980s: Challenging the Fetishisation of the Decade

A lecture by Eddie Chambers, Holder of the David Bruton, Jr. Centennial Professorship in Art History at the University of Texas at Austin

Over the course of the past couple of decades, there has been an acceleration of what might be described as the fetishisation of the 1980s. It is a decade that has come to be closely associated with a limited number of Black British artists whose work came to prominence in what has been dubbed the ‘Critical Decade’. But while some artists have prospered through an acceleration of the 1980s remembering of their work, others, who similarly emerged into visibility during the same broad period, are accorded no place in these revisionist narratives. What are the consequences and implications of the persistent advancement of arguably partial scholarship and skewed curatorial attention? If ‘context’ within art history is all-important, what are we to make of scholarship and curatorial framings in which the 1980s exists as a sole or dominant context? To what extent might we speculate on wider lessons that might be learned within art history?

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