Self-Promotion.

As the art market exploded in the 1980s, young artists were ready to take advantage of the public's desire to invest in art. By middecade many had become as well-known as pop-music stars — and as image conscious. Like their 1960s predecessors Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg, artists of the 1980s learned to market not only their work but their own public personae. Neo-Expressionists Julian Schnabel and David Salle sought to make their lives as legendary as their work. Keith Haring and Kenny Scharf caught the Zeitgeist of hip-hop culture and sold their street sensibility as fashion to the malls of suburbia. Others, such as Jeff Koons, "sampled" and recycled words and images from other media (and earlier eras) or, like Jenny Holzer, caught the public's appetite for slogans and sound bites. Much of 1980s art, from graffiti to...