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.