The

Art

Prodigies

of

the

Nirvana

Era

Look

Back

on

the

’90s

The 1990s may be the last decade that we really think of as a decade. Since surviving Y2K, we have had “the aughts” and the “tens” (or “teens”), but such terms haven’t been universally adopted. “The ’20s,” at least until now, still applies to that roaring era a century ago.

The Turner Prize-winning British found-art and video artist Mark Leckey has a theory about that. “At the end of the 20th century, there was this kind of timeline, and there was an expectation that each decade would produce something new, that novelty would arise out of each turn,” he said in a video interview.

Since 2000, he said, the new technological landscape offered us so many different perspectives that cultural life, as he put it, “went horizontal.”