Word: cataloging
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...museum takes a controversial look at the interplay of "high" art and "low" (popular and mass) culture. Alas, the survey works better in the catalog than on the walls...
...Popular Culture," which kicks off MOMA's 1990-91 season. For the past few months one has heard the baying of critics as they hurled themselves against the turkey wire, eager to fix their fangs in it. Old-style formalities like seeing the exhibition or reading its catalog were dropped as writers like Barbara Rose in the Journal of Art expressed their proleptic disapproval of what the show would be and do. And when at last it opened, Roberta Smith in the New York Times denounced it as "a disaster . . . arbitrary, peculiar and maligning." More maligned than maligning, one might...
...size of the subject virtually ensures that the kind of narrative Gopnik and Varnedoe present works better in the catalog than on the walls. In fact, it is hard to see how any museum installation -- linear and one-track by + nature -- could convey a real sense of the peculiar eddies of cultural flux and reflux that they have set out to describe. Abstract Expressionism, for instance, tended to set itself above popular culture -- yet one of its true icons, De Kooning's 1950 study for Woman, had a smile cut from an ad for Camel cigarettes. The work does...
...final object be done with the necessary detail. Varnedoe and Gopnik have gone into their subject with vast scholarly elan, mining arcana from the areas where art and life, under the impulse of a modernism striving to refresh itself, are layered. If you want to know what was the catalog model of Marcel Duchamp's urinal, which nursery book Max Ernst got a particular collage element from, or which frame panels from 1962 war comics drawn by Russ Heath were conflated by Roy Lichtenstein to produce Okay, Hot-Shot, 1963, you need look no further...
...catalog is not a mass of fanzine trivia. It is the indispensable text on its subject, whose every page vibrates with the authors' enthusiasm for the "high," their curiosity about the "low" and their richly inflected sense of the complex traffic between the two. Gopnik and Varnedoe write better than their critics. The next-to-last essay ("Contemporary Reflections," by Gopnik, covering a wide swath from David Salle and Cindy Sherman to the short- lived graffiti movement) is, on its own, the best summary yet written of American...