Word: gopnik
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Varnedoe and the show's co-curator, Adam Gopnik (art critic of the New Yorker), have taken on a sprawling, slippery, tangled theme -- a survey of the transactions between fine art and popular culture over three-quarters of a century, from Cubism to the '80s. They set out to show how some "high" artists raided "low" (popular and mass) culture for their own purposes. Not all of them, needless to say, did. You won't find the visual argot of advertising, news photography, graffiti or comic strips in the work of the great Apollonians of the past hundred years, from...
...show's problems lie elsewhere. The first is the subject's diffuseness, its almost limitless size. Gopnik and Varnedoe have taken four categories to look at: graffiti, caricature, advertising and the comics. But what about the movies, TV or photography? One can sympathize with the curators' problem: any story must have a narrative core, and to secure one this account has been heavily edited. Nevertheless one misses references to these forms -- even though, if exhibited with any density, they would have made the show unendurably prolix...
...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...