The 80’s are back…again.

  • How or where are the principles of “collage” and “mixed media” used today?
  • In what ways do we see the 80’s aesthetic / ideologies in more of the recent “cyberculture, vaporwave or glitch art” trends?
  • How was self-publishing in the Postmodern-era (“the use of the photocopies/zines became an alternative voice for communities who were not well represented in mainstream media”) similar to the use of today’s technologies?

In today’s art trends we see a lot of retro aesthetics in general. There has been favoritism with the 80’s recently in music, film, fashion, art, and design. When talking about film there has been a growth in the number of films that adopt a sort of lo-fi aesthetic, grainy textures, and overall poor image quality cameras. The films are no longer necessarily set in that decade but the style is clearly there and more often than not there is at least one reference to the 80’s in the films soundtrack. The 80’s were about excess and consumerism which are both digging their claws deeper into society today. Fashion is borrowing literal styles and including them in their current collections while sticking to the era’s wild neons and loud prints. What was widely considered ugly, out of style, and like totally not tubular anymore, has become the vintage style of the moment.  This proves that art has sort of hit an endless cycle of recycling and regurgitating back a newly marketed “vintage” product with a small element of innovation, if any at all.

      Today’s audience is fascinated with this era which are now considered “the good old times” and after being locked in the house for two years I can see how we ended up here. Collages are made with modern technology like Photoshop but only so that they can resemble something handmade or old-fashioned. More modern instances of collages exist in social media which can now include many methods of delivery for their content. Modern websites are also used to share art portfolios, which are essentially a large collage of an artist’s work. Netflix could be considered a collage of films, or YouTube of both amateur and professional videos and slideshows. These platforms can provide both inexpensive and expensive ways to share content. This opens the door for anyone with basic means to be able to share a piece of themselves and add it to the quilt of human records living on the web. A global audience could be reached with the right content and determination thus paving the way for work, fame, or ridicule. It has never been this easy to publish work worldwide and it is something that is arguably both abused and taken for granted.