The Downtown Book: The New York Art Scene 1974 – 1984
edited by Marvin J. Taylor
Princeton University Press ($35)

It is always both startling and inevitable when yesterday’s avant-garde inexorably turns into today’s orthodoxy. Samuel Johnson famously estimated that the passage of a century’s time was prerequisite to an objective evaluation of a work’s reputation. The acceleration of culture aside, by Dr. Johnson’s formulation The Downtown Book arrives 80 years early, yet much of the art and music it covers already seems as distant and displaced as a sepia-toned daguerreotype.

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