Incursions into Popular Culture

The notion of New York visual artists and performance artists making feature-length films for wide distribution, sometimes even within the Hollywood system, is a complex one. In the 1980s and 1990s a significant number of these artists, who include Robert Longo, Cindy Sherman, Kathryn Bigelow, David Salle, David Byrne, Eric Bogosian, Amos Poe, Becky Johnston, and Julian Schnabel, crossed the boundary between high art and popular culture. And they did so in ways that exceeded any similar such forays by other generations.2 For this reason, we must consider how the more mainstream arena in many cases reconfigured the artists’ earlier art-world concerns. We must also inquire how the presence of these artists as directors in commercial film practices altered the meaning of their works, and, in the best work, made visible the very processes of production.