Even before the political ascendancy of Donald J. Trump, who, among other distinctions remains an avatar of 1980s materialism, the ’80s, it seemed, were under review. In May, an auction at Christie’s set a record for the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat, when a large, untitled canvas he created in Italy in 1982 sold for $57.3 million. More recently, the clothing line Alice & Olivia, in conjunction with the Basquiat estate, produced graphic printed skirts paying tribute to the artist, while the Japanese retailer Uniqlo delivered Basquiat T-shirts. Beyond that, the Museum of Modern Art is currently reprising “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency,” Nan Goldin’s visual confessional of indulgence and torment, a defining artistic achievement of the ’80s whose themes — violence among intimates, AIDS, the reimagining of family — were totemic to the period.
It stands as a journalist’s curse to seek meaning in trends when often coincidence is merely exerting a hand. Perhaps ’80s revivalism was inevitable after a long period in which the culture was steeped in nostalgia for New York in the ’70s (novels like “City on Fire” and “The Flamethrowers,” television series like “Vinyl” and “The Get Down”). Or perhaps the ’80s have simply come to seem more relatable to our current moment because Wall Street then, too, wielded a disproportionate influence over the city’s psyche — Basquiat facetiously painted in Armani. The hedonism of the ’70s had given way to a new and necessary decadent rage (“Die yuppie scum,” as the rioters against East Village gentrification declared). The power structure of the Reagan years — repressive, phobic, money-loving, indifferent to the mounting horrors of AIDS — offered artists and activists something to beat their fists against, and whatever might have inspired these renewed reflections, their rebellions now seem very much worth revisiting.
Both David France, in his new book, “How to Survive a Plague,” a chronicle of the AIDS years that serves as a companion to his Oscar-nominated documentary of the same name, and Tim Murphy, in “Christodora,” his novelistic telling of the period and its haunting aftermath, offer guidebooks, in essence, to battling the most destructive kinds of oppression. What is required is an almost baroque, almost pathological commitment.
“When I think back on that period of late ’80s activism,” Mr. Murphy told me, “the people who were really doing things were out every night; they were doing something every single night, inhabiting a whole downtown world of nocturnal animals. For young people who look at that period with some degree of envy, I’d say, ‘Well, now, here’s your chance, now is the time to get into big rooms and see how people did it 30 years ago.’”
In the ’80s, art, activism and night life were closely yoked — the revolution was happening at a nightclub like Danceteria as much as it was happening in those big rooms with terrible coffee. A tepid effort at recapturing that spirit was evident this past week as well-known artists, not typically known for political engagement, gathered outside the Puck Building, where Ivanka Trump is thought to keep parts of her art collection, to protest the entirety of the Trump gestalt. Things were quiet and orderly — this was not Act Up outside the Federal Drug Administration’s headquarters. The artist Marilyn Minter, who marched with a battery-powered candle, spoke to a reporter about the resurgence of fascism in this country, but what Mussolini detractor would have risen up against him in ire with a decorative tabletop accent?
A precursor to the protest had been an Instagram account, newly established by art-world figures, called Dear Ivanka, in which photographs of the president-elect’s daughter, looking very contentedly 0.01 percent, are juxtaposed with statements of fear and discontent about the impending Trump administration. But Instagram activism, no matter how aesthetically compelling, will never have the impact of staging funerals.
In the theater, some of what is emerging in the vein of ’80s renaissance reminds us of what social networks really meant before they meant Facebook. A new play, “Street Children,” which made its debut the other day at the New Ohio Theater in Greenwich Village, is set in 1988, among a group of young transgender women who inhabit the lower Hudson piers. The play looks at the bonds and sense of belonging formed during a chaotic and dangerous time when blood families routinely disavowed difference and the acutely ostracized moved to New York, in all its welcoming seediness, and built street families or “houses” — connections of profound, lifesaving intensity in the predigital age.
Last month saw the arrival on Broadway of “Falsettos,” the critically praised musical, which had its premiere there in 1992 as an exploration of love, commitment and shifting domestic arrangements — made families, unconventional families — among Manhattan sophisticates of the previous decade amid the traumas of a plague. It delivers some of the same idea.
When I asked James Lapine, who directed the production this time and the last, what inspired the revival, he mentioned the experience of taking his bright, well-educated 23-year-old assistant to see “The Normal Heart,” Larry Kramer’s important AIDS play. “At intermission she looked at me and said: ‘Is this based on fact? I mean I know about AIDS, but I didn’t know it was like this.’ That made me think it was important to tell these stories now to the younger generations.” All future activists need history lessons.
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