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The Nostalgia for ART CLUB2000’s Cool Cynicism At Artists Space, New York, a retrospective of the collective’s body of work reminisces on the punkish criticality of the 1990s Encountering the work of ART CLUB 2000 (AC2K) for the first time in 2021 feels a bit like someone telling you that your parents were cool when they were in their twenties. (I wasn’t even born when the group was founded in 1992.) Active until 1999, the collective of seven precocious students from Cooper Union – Patterson Beckwith, Gillian Haratani, Daniel McDonald, Shannon Pultz, Sarah Rossiter, Soibian Spring and Craig Wadlin – made work that discussed and embodied New York’s (and the art world’s) most salient hypocrisies of the period: the commodification and gentrification of Manhattan’s downtown (from SoHo to Chelsea) and the neoliberalism of the city’s progressive cultural workers.
Supposedly, when he first saw the early-‘90s group photos by ART CLUB 2000, art dealer Colin de Land hated them. Not because the images were bad—quite the contrary. Because he knew that they were too good, that the group’s collective self-portraits would overpower everything else they tried to do. He was right, more or less. The cool retrospective of ART CLUB 2000’s work at Artists Space is sort of about the Monkey’s Paw curse of generational fame—a curse which the group was very much aware of. De Land’s American Fine Arts was a much-mythologized alt-commercial space, what Roberta Smith once called an “anti-art gallery.” Embracing “no capital as cultural capital,” its scrappy program took all kinds of fanciful risks.