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.