Word: alloways
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Robert Burns was born 250 years ago, on January 25, 1759, in Alloway, Scotland. His father was a tenant farmer and his mother never learned to write, but Burns read voraciously and managed to secure a fairly thorough education. His family had very little money - when his father died, he left the family bankrupt - which inspired the egalitarian, anti-authority themes that would appear in Burns' future works...
...David N. Alloway Upper Montclair...
...portents of "masscult" means nothing unless it is subjected-as by Oldenburg-to a profound change and rethinking; that banality is not always imaginative bliss. And if one happens to find sense in these propositions, it is hard to take all that seriously the marginal artists whose work Alloway has selected. Their work may have this or that to do with signs, but on aesthetic grounds it varies between limpness and indulgent kitsch, typified by the show's California contingent, Joe Goode, Ed Ruscha and Mel Ramos...
Goode's constructed fragments of staircases are among the emptiest works of art ever to travel east of the Rockies, and Ruscha's variations on the painted word-as-object, which derive from Jasper Johns, are so cute that Alloway's normal eloquence is reduced to calling them "deceptively obvious." In fact, their obviousness is not deceptive; it is just obvious. And Ramos, whose Batmen and Playboy Bunnies go as far as pop ever went in unctuous, opportunistic triviality, seems to be in the show merely to illustrate an amusing feedback loop between pop and commercial...
Despite these and other longueurs, this is a worthy show. Alloway has succeeded where many previous critics failed, by clarifying the issues of pop and reminding us that the time of generalization is past. There is no honest way of rejecting or accepting the whole of pop, but it is useful to note how its good works survive as aesthetic objects and not brassy manifestoes of Yankee materialism...