Urban Arts in the 1980s : inner-city voices

In 1955 the builder of Rockefeller Center had Diego Rivera's murals portraying Lenin destroyed before they could be seen in public, thereby creating the historic precedent of confrontation between capitalism and the arts in New York City. In the 1960s pop art turned the mass media into a material for the arts, and a pop artist such as Warhol strived to be provocative (Danto), however, in the 1980s, popular art was placed more at the center of a struggle between artists and controllers of mass media. In New York City Rivera's unfinished murals provide a precedent for the destruction of the arts by neoliberalism in the 1980s. On Forty-Second Street in Manhattan scenes straight out of the film Midnight Cowboy were replaced by a corporate sponsored urban renewal. The result was a Disneyland type language. The arts that were threatening to undermine capitalist mythology in the 1980s were successfully rendered ephemeral by the undermining force of late capitalism. Artists who first recuperated popular culture in the 1980s now have their techniques incorporated in mass media. Today it has made such threats to a neoliberal hegemony less likely especially since neoliberalism has been able to reinforce its position thanks to IT (Harvey). NYC-based artists at that time often identified with lifestyles of poverty and protested against the territorial encroachment of neoliberalism. At the same time the larger public became acquainted with neoliberalism thanks to terms such as yuppie, inner-city, urban renewal, gentrification, and consumerism as they appeared in the media. Artists instead made popular culture a territory for the expression of the personal in order to project their vision into the public spotlight. This represented a threat to the growing hegemony of neoliberalism in the public imagination in the 1980s, and on the products of popular culture thanks to what Harvey asserts was an unquestioned control of the mass media, and a growing monopoly on the production of ideas. In this perspective Harvey cites a 1976-headline taken from The New York Dailey News : "Ford to NYC: Drop Dead." This paper approaches a language of neo-liberalism that was the product of the 1980s and studies through this medium a before and after. It does this by contrasting examples from different artistic milieus based in the NYC metropolitan area. Artistic expression made identities the stakes in an attempt to defend social classes such as intellectuals, gays and feminist, or the working class. After a theoretical exposition of the concept of mythology and neoliberalism we will look at examples in narrative, rock music, visual arts and multi-media drawn from the 1980s.