Word: artful
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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WALKER EVANS: AMERICAN PHOTOGRAPHS, Museum of Modern Art, New York City. These spare, poetic images from the Depression era gave American photography a candid new spirit and a lasting legacy. Through April...
...York City's Museum of Modern Art, which showed no great enthusiasm for Andy Warhol while he was alive, went after him con brio as soon as he was dead. The bakemeats were barely cold upon the funeral table when the word went out that MOMA was going to give Warhol the palladium of a full-scale retrospective -- his first in New York since the more premature effort that went on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1971. Whether MOMA wanted to get the crowds before a rival museum did, or simply to get the job over...
...this fair to Warhol? No, if you are among those who think he was the most important American artist since Jackson Pollock, a genius whose spirit continues to brood over American culture and to infuse the best young art of our time. Yes, if you think that Warhol had about five remarkable years (1962-67) followed by a long downhill slide into money-raking banality, with his social portraits and his silk-screen editions of dogs, famous Jews of the 20th century and Mercedes; or that his actual influence on younger artists varied from liberating to moderately disastrous. The show...
Instead, in Warhol one had the detached art-supplier with mass-cultural fixations on things everyone knew: canned soup, Liz, dollar bills, death. Fame was the real qualifier. One doubts, somehow, that Warhol plowed through Faust before cranking out his flashy and unfelt variations on Tischbein's portrait of Goethe. No ideological motives lurk behind the benign collective visage of his innumerable Mao Zedongs; but a billion Chinese could no more be wrong about such a celebrity than 200 million Americans could be about Jackie or Marilyn...
...production and reproduction, and have been run back through it so widely and often that they contain very few surprises. With a few piercing exceptions, they seem generic. His Mona Lisas are by now as famous as Leonardo's, especially for people who don't care much for old art. (Except that, for a lot of the audience, they are old art -- mysterious icons of the remote '60s.) On the whole, the sense of expansion and refreshment one feels in going from a reproduction of a well-known painting to its original is lacking, because his paintings are all based...