An untitled 1987 image by Richard Prince, borrowed from a Marlborough ad.
While some of this fall's major museums will trot out the usual big names—van Gogh, Picasso, Warhol—and try to say new things about them, others will instead look at artists that may not be known to as many viewers. On Nov. 16, for instance, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston will open “This Will Have Been: Art, Love and Politics in the 1980s." Almost all of today’s art depends on work from the 1980s, but this show will be one of the first to take that era’s measure.