Word: graffiti
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...FEBRUARY and March of last year, the Danforth Center put up graffiti sheets in the houses to solicit comments about gender in the classroom. Remarks such as those excerpted here in italics attest to the problems' severity; many women here feel marginalized by the aggressive atmosphere of the typical Harvard classroom...
...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 Monet and Matisse to Richard Diebenkorn. But this vernacular, Gopnik and Varnedoe rightly argue, is essential to a grasp of Cubism, Dada, Russian Constructivism, Surrealism and their European offshoots, along with a great deal...
...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...
...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...
...essay covers is scarcely represented on the walls. Why should these artists be considered worth writing about but not worth showing? You can see why MOMA might object on grounds of quality, since so much of the work was so poor. And you can't put lost subway graffiti in a museum anyway. But to restrict one's coverage of the '80s to Jeff Koons, Jenny Holzer and the admirable Elizabeth Murray is tokenism. If the media-obsessed art of the '80s was worth putting in the catalog it should have been on the walls, if only to illustrate...