Remember Neo-Geo? Haim Steinbach’s shelf units, Jeff Koons’s basketballs, Ashley Bickerton’s tech-fetishes? Remember Hal Foster and how the “Damaged Goods” show claimed to confuse and challenge the boundaries separating high art from mass production, museum installation from commodity display? Now, a decade later, Neo-Geo’s retrenchment to high art systems and values is taken as evidence of the movement’s conceptual skid, a skid greased, perhaps, by the trackless art market and the work’s own accelerated shelf life. I would argue that Neo-Geo did not fail so much as it was out-hustled, out-innovated, and outclassed by the arena it claimed to have entered: the real world of consumer product design, innovation, marketing, and display.
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