Word: gopnik
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Much of the art on view conforms to the recipe for postmodernist political utterance set out, with lapidary accuracy, by the art critic Adam Gopnik a couple of years ago. That is, you take an obvious proposition that few would disagree with -- "Racism is wrong" or "One should not persecute gays" -- and encode it so obliquely that by the time the viewer has figured it out, he or she feels, as the saying goes, included in the discourse...
...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...
Consequently, the show reads as a set of illustrations to the book, for only in the book can the comparison of demotic source with 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...
...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...