Collection: Paul Taylor

Paul Taylor (1957–1992) was an Australian-born critic, curator, and editor whose writing helped define the critical reception of postmodern art and popular culture in the 1980s. Based between Melbourne and New York, he founded the influential journal Art & Text in 1981 and contributed to a generation of publications that took seriously the intersection of art, fashion, music, and mass media at a moment when those boundaries were actively dissolving.

As editor of Impresario: Malcolm McLaren & The British New Wave (New Museum / MIT Press, 1988), Taylor produced one of the defining exhibition catalogues of the decade — a document that framed McLaren not simply as a music industry figure but as a producer of images, attitudes, and cultural systems, and that positioned punk and New Wave within the institutional space of contemporary art discourse.

The materials gathered here are printed traces of Taylor’s editorial and curatorial activity: publications and documents that record the moment when street culture, fashion, and postmodern image-making entered the museum as a serious subject.