Art Worker: Doing Time in the New York Artworld

In Art Worker: Doing Time in the New York Art World, Alan W. Moore weaves stories of a New York downtown art scene collectively engaged in provocative anti-curation and television production to bridge boundaries between art and the wider world. On New York in the '70s and ‘80s, a dense cultural ecology that birthed of video art, punk, hip-hop, anti-curation and so much more. The long rolling crescendo of Art Worker comes in Alan W. Moore’s discussion of the expansive art scene around Collaborative Projects (Colab) that had its heyday from 1977 to the mid-1980s. Colab, situated in New York’s downtown art scene, was a collective that engaged in provocative anti-curation and television production in efforts to bridge boundaries between art and the wider world. Moore’s accounting makes this a very personal story. He allows us alongside him and his friends and comrades as they make things that will eventually be called “historical” – the Real Estate Show, the Times Square Show – exhibitions Colab produced that were key events for some art history. Moore entangles them within an expansive linear narrative that starts with summers of love spent tramping in Europe and days of wonder doing radical cultural programming for the University of California. The book won The Best German Book Design prize in 2023