ABSTRACT
New image painting pointed in two directions. One was toward "fine" art, the culmination of which was neoexpressionism. The other was toward an extreme "bad" painting, an art based more than ever before on anarchic and infantile impulses, an anyone-can-do-it aesthetic, and the trivialities of mass culture. Neo-"bad" painting was identified with a generation of artists who lived and worked in Manhattans Lower East Side, soon given the catchier name East Village. Recognizing the prevalence of the punk aesthetic, local nightclubs found that it was good business to allow artists to perform. East Village Art began to command widespread art-world attention in 1980 with The Times Square Show, organized by an artists group called Collaborative Projects, Inc., or Colab. The commercialization of art was resisted by members of Colab and other dissident groups. The punk attitude became so pervasive in the early and middle 1980s that art professionals vied to discover the "baddest.".
