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In the '90s, Schnabel began to pour more of his energies into filmmaking, which turned out to be a better place for them than painting. In 1996 he directed Basquiat, about you-know-who, with its peerlessly funny impersonation of Andy Warhol by David Bowie. Before Night Falls,made four years later, brought an Oscar nomination for Best Actor to Javier Bardem, who played Reinaldo Arenas, an AIDS-stricken Cuban writer who committed suicide in New York City in 1990. Even before Schnabel began directing, Longo directed a film, Johnny Mnemonic, starring Keanu Reeves in a futuristic film noir. So did David Salle, the painter whose voyeuristic conjunctions and overlays of imagery from all over had made him another brand name in Boone's stable. But only Schnabel has actually launched a plausible career for himself as a director. Although he still exhibits art and had a large retrospective in Frankfurt last year, his next movie project is likely to overshadow anything he has done lately for a gallery. His adaptation of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, the memoir of a French magazine editor left paralyzed by a stroke, is scheduled to star Johnny Depp.
Later in the decade, taste shifted away from hot-blooded Expressionism to something much more cerebral, bringing to the fore conceptual artists like Richard Prince, who rephotographed portions of existing magazine ads to expose their underlying messages of desire, domination and anxiety. As always, the newer phalanx of artists tended to look back at whoever had come just before and wince. "There was a traditional view that I grew up with," says Peter Halley, who emerged as a theoretician of what got called Neo-Geo. "Artists had a high calling. They should not let things out of their studio that were bad."
Halley's paintings were and are brightly colored geometric abstractions. "What I'm doing by today's standards is pretty tame," says Halley, who is head of the graduate program in painting at Yale's school of art. "On the other hand, I'm also associated with ideas about changes in technology, the digitalization of culture, that I find young artists are very interested in." And for all his reservations about the decade's club-crawling, fashion-flaunting, big-paint-splattering beginnings, he has good things to say about the '80s as an arena of ideas. "In the '80s, you had a bunch of very distinctive notions about what a work should be about. I can't locate a group of artists now about whom I would say, 'This is really interesting. This is a new direction.'"
Even among artists who had come to light in the early, now degraded part of the decade, there are some who quietly pursued serious careers that have brought them into the present with their reputations intact. Eric Fischl first drew attention in the early '80s with weirdly charged scenes of suburban life that parted the curtain on things, generally meaning sex, that three centuries of genre painting had kept tucked away. He continues to do work you want to see. But he fears that another bubble is rising in the art market, in which prices are climbing fast again and auctions are setting new records all the time. Says Fischl: "What's going on now in the art world makes the '80s seem positively spiritual."