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High Art's Affair With Popular Culture
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19022 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1991 |
2,219 Words |
| Author
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Jason Edward Kaufman
Jason Edward Kaufman is an art historian and critic based in
New York. |
As the last decade of the century begins, we lovers of art have the singular opportunity to examine in one exhibition such affirmed, masterpieces as a pair of bronze ale cans, a porcelain urinal, a stainless-steel balloon bunny, and an enlarged frame from a comic book. We all know such things are the stuff of art in the modern age, and secretly, many of us have lamented it. Oh, we've heard the rationales, the theories, the aesthetic and political manifestos. We know it all makes (or made) absolute sense in certain "revolutionary" circles. But, deep in our hearts we've known there was something very wrong with the glorification of the unadulterated banal, which is why we looked to the Museum of Modern Art to set the record straight.
High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture engages a subject--the relationship between "high" art and "low" culture--so broad and complex that it would seem to defy comprehensive treatment in an exhibition. Yet, if any museum on earth could be expected to produce such a survey, it was the Museum of Modern Art. MoMA's superb permanent collection and reputation help to garner difficult loans and attract sponsors (AT&T picked up the tab for High and Low). Only MoMA, in recent years, has attempted an "idea show" on such a multifarious theme as Primitivism in 20th-Century Art, and carried it out with aplomb. In the wake of the smashing success of former chief curator William S. Rubin's Picasso/Braque: Pioneering Cubism show, the museum seemed poised to once again soar miles above the capacities and accomplishments of the world's great museums of modern art.
Expansive Pretense
But, alas, High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture is not all it was trumped up to be. In fact, considering the expansiveness suggested by the title, it would be difficult to call the show a success at all. Kirk Varnedoe, Jr., recently appointed director of the museum's department of painting and sculpture, has collaborated with his former student at the Institute of Fine Arts, New Yorker art critic Adam Gopnik. Together they have selected a range of works to illustrate the interchange between "high" (i.e., fine) and "low" (i.e., popular, consumer) arts. To narrow down their field of inquiry, they exclude photography, cinema, television, architecture, and pop music, thereby abrogating the title's pretense toward comprehensiveness.
It is still a vast show, comprising more than 250 works by approximately fifty artists, juxtaposed with various newspaper pages, print ads, sales catalogs, and comics. The items are arranged into
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