Downtown/Uptown, co-curated by Mary Boone and Brett Gorvy, charts the exterior and interior geographies of these not-so-discrete domains. Boone’s generational impact is the product of connections brokered between artists themselves, the mechanisms of buying and selling that enable their survival, and the institutions upon which canonization ultimately depends.
It’s hard to take metropolitan American feminism seriously after the hollow girlboss (fourth-wave) 2010s, but the issues of the 1980s have only slightly evolved—we are aware that everyone suffers the commodified politics of looking and performance, and that we have larger material concerns at hand. After entering through an extended foyer ruled by Andy Warhol’s high-impact art-world portraits and Kenny Scharf’s two- and three-dimensional neon compositions, you ascend to the “woman landing” featuring Barbara Kruger’s Untitled (What me worry?) (1987) facing three Guerrilla Girls prints. If you’re tired of Kruger, it’s because she aped advertising so well that her signature visual language was snapped up and spit back out by the branding machine. This particular work centers what she, as an artist, is actually doing: juxtaposing subterranean neuroticism against glib surface, relitigating background via foreground, holding in tension the bipolar demands of contemporary life. Down in the foyer, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s punching bag is emblazoned with the words “Mary BooneTM,” a tribute from one former outsider to another framed as a defiant question for the culture: who suffers for the sins of the art world?
Brashness softens into abjection in a room of photographs that embody the expressionistic capacity of the medium. Louise Lawler’s Does Andy Warhol Make You Cry? (1988) reveals a conceptual sense of futility rendered visceral in Richard Prince’s beatific Ektacolor girls and David Wojnarowicz’s black-and-white prints. Andres Serrano’s Immersion (Piss Christ) (1987) dominates the room, a moment of transgression jellied like an ambered insect. Despite its original reception, the work is not perceived to be so perverse in 2025. Today, it captures the immersion of icons in the caustic fluid of quotidian life. “Piss” is a crude term for an organic byproduct—which, like the vibrant light filtered through Serrano’s microcosmic environment: ground established as deliberately as that of a devotional painting, remains simply beautiful through his lens. Submersion and subsumption are inevitable: Kruger and other artists working in the bold American pop cultural idiom suffer the consequences of oversaturation as they themselves become iconic.
If you look through Jeff Koons’s Two Ball Total Equilibrium Tank (Spalding Dr. J Silver Series) (1985), you see the surrounding works refracted into alternating chimerical hybrids, depending on your angle. It’s a neat capsular representation of curation, which establishes self-referential language through permutations of parts. Consider Koons’s stainless steel Travel Bar (1986) alongside Cady Noland’s Crate of Beer (1989) between which the decorative fixtures of possession are juxtaposed against the discarded shells of consumption. They converge toward a kind of vanitas, a reminder to appreciate the fleeting objects of this world. Smart curators imply connections, inviting you to wonder independently or through art criticism. Koons’s similarly metallic balloon dogs blow the capitalist still even sheen up to absurd proportions but lack the crucial, contrapuntal memento mori. During paradigm shifts, the instinct to seek comfort in shiny, bloated forms persists.
The exhibition checklist reads like a “who’s who” of a milieu Boone herself defined; with that kind of line-up, it’s hard to imagine this show being anything but a smash hit. But without proper narrative structure, aesthetic coherence, or an interesting semiotic framework, great art in an exhibition can be done a disservice. Conversely, successful curation plus a convincing/confusing press release can validate some questionable art. The epithet “museum-quality” applies only when both elements succeed.
Downtown/Uptown restates why the greats are great. It also reinforces the fact that they existed outside of their market quantities. We see Wojnarowicz, Tseng Kwong Chi, Keith Haring, and Robert Mapplethorpe before the AIDS epidemic eventually claimed their lives. Basquiat’s Gravestone (1987)—made of hinged door-like panels one year before his fatal overdose—joins Haring’s Untitled (Gold Vase) (1981), with its distinctive geometries (including pyramids) and athletic scenes of frolicking men that suggest a Greek funerary krater, and Ross Bleckner’s bleak 27764 (1987). Here lies the duty of the survivors. Even Warhol, king of the bloodless commercial, loved and immortalized his friends. They worked against each other and in tandem; in features and references, they formed an informatic social network, a collaborative document made to outlast them.
The simplest, most intimate room of the show, with Francesco Clemente’s sensitive watercolors hung on its small walls like parallel shadows of the Warhol series produced over a similar timeframe, is primarily devoted to ephemera: three vitrines containing the generative infrastructure of the exhibition and era. Boone makes the record explicit; she lays bare a map that, in large part, she drew.
To have a wildly lucrative artistic career is to have everything eventually taken from you. Between the jaws of capital, artists are pressured to hyper-evolve into cartoonish distortions of themselves just to out-compete the pursuer, the persistent question of relevance, the process by which expression balloons into copy and kitsch. When was the last time you thought about what a Haring or a Kruger or a Basquiat actually means? Likely not since you were in school. Fitting, then, that the first work you encounter is Haring’s chalk-on-paper untitled work made between 1981–86, like a blackboard placed directly by the front door as if to say, “Class is in session.”
We have to keep thinking about the past. Though canons are necessarily incomplete and inherently product-oriented, they exist for a reason: through specific and intentional curation, they relate the narratives of time. Artists have always required careful attention—real allies, real relationships, the kind that develop over years, not a press or trend cycle. It’s certainly still possible to make (or invest in) great art that means something to you, to the market, and to history. It’s not expedient; it is a project of taste and endurance. But that’s the only way you voice a generation.