THE 1980S WERE until recently a byword for everything to be reviled in contemporary art—the corruption of the market, the shallowness of the spectacle, and so on—in contrast to the purported rigor and purity of the conceptual, performance, and anti-form adventures of the preceding decades. A few years into the new millennium, however, it began to be evident that the tide of consensus was in reflux. In 2003, for instance, Artforum published a pair of ’80s-themed special issues, and Francesco Bonami and Daniel Birnbaum’s exhibition “Delays and Revolutions” in the Italian Pavilion at that year’s