If you want to be pragmatic, you can blame the real-estate market for New York's last great explosion of cultural convergence. Low rents in SoHo and the East Village, coupled with the city's 1974 Loft Law (or the Emergency Tenant Protection Act), allowed artists to live in the industrial spaces of downtown Manhattan. The cheap accommodations, wild-eyed art-school grads, rock 'n' roll and a post-'60s urge to make artwork that was both new and populist conspired to create the downtown New York art scene. It flourished across all media -- painting, music, performance, dance, sculpture, video, film, installation, fashion, graffiti, photography and writing -- and the city is still famous for it today. So many artists made their names in the decade that followed the Loft Law that to list them all would be impossible: Everyone from Keith Haring and Cindy Sherman to the Ramones, Karen Finley and Eric Bogosian were cutting their teeth, often separated by no more than a few city blocks. The movement, such as it was, managed to incorporate everything from the birth of American punk rock to highbrow postmodern painting -- from the scene at CBGB to the one that would later be lionized at institutions like MoMA. This January New York University's Grey Art Gallery presents a retrospective of the era called "The Downtown Show: The New York Art Scene, 1974-1984," curated by Paper senior editor Carlo McCormick, Marvin Taylor, director of NYU's Fales Library, and Lynn Gumpert, director of the Grey Art Gallery. With more than 300 pieces in the show and around seven years in the making, the exhibit is the most comprehensive record of that period ever mounted. ("I'm the only person fool enough to try," says McCormick with self-effacing humor.) The Downtown Book: The New York Art Scene, 1974-1984 (Princeton University Press), which accompanies the exhibition, is out now and includes personal rememberances by Lydia Lunch, Michael Musto and Paper columnist Ann Magnuson.

One of the primary purposes of the show, McCormick says, is to illustrate how the various artists, who were later categorized according to the canons of their mediums, were, at one point, all up in each other's business. "Jean-Michel Basquiat is known for art, but he was also in a band called Gray," he says. "There's a poster he did for Glenn O'Brien's TV Party," he continues. "It's a poster for a TV show by Glenn, who is a writer, and Glenn featured guests like Debbie Harry and Fab 5 Freddy -- a classic example of hybridity." That confluence is represented by the artists in the show, including those whose work is pictured here: Basquiat, David Wojnarowicz, Richard Hell and Patti Smith, Robert Longo, Rebecca Howland, Betsey Johnson, Tseng Kwong Chi and Mike Bidlo. Their kind of widespread cultural cross-pollination hasn't been seen in the city since.

"The Downtown Show" is up January 10-April 1, 2006, at Grey Art Gallery, New York University, 100 Washington Square East, (212) 998-6780.

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