In the mid-1970s and early ’80s, many artists chafed against the highly restrictive model of Modernism promulgated by Clement Greenberg, a powerful and influential critic. Thumbing their noses at his declaration that for every avant-garde there is a rear guard producing kitsch, they wholeheartedly embraced bad taste and incorporated all sorts of detritus to create a trash culture all their own. Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt and Rhonda Zwillinger reveled in over-the-top decoration, challenging hierarchical distinctions between so-called “masculine” art and “feminine” craft. Mike Bidlo deliberately faked hundreds of paintings by Jackson Pollock for his re-creation of Peggy Guggenheim’s townhouse at P.S. 1. David Hammons used elephant dung culled from the Big Apple Circus to create sculptures that reference both Swiftian scatology and the politics of diaspora. From the early 1980s, these outlaw refusés and their playful creations filled the streets as well as the narrow storefront galleries that quickly proliferated in “Alphabet City”—slang for the territory delineated by Avenues A, B, C, and D in the East Village—which soon dethroned SoHo as the newest and most vibrant center of Manhattan’s art world.