This volume accompanies a groundbreaking exhibition, focusing exclusively on New York’s 1980s art scene. It reunites many internationally renowned artists with the urban context that shaped and inspired them. The era, known for its vibrant, vital, discordant, and sometimes obscene art, gave rise to many recognizable features of the contemporary art world. As artists from this decade now set auction records, the period is ripe for reexamination.

• Explores themes of cool irony, media culture, consumerism, and cartoons.