Word: moma
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...long time, perhaps never, has a major show at New York City's Museum of Modern Art started with such awful press as "High and Low: Modern Art and 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...
There have been two lines of attack. The first: by putting "low" culture -- graffiti, mass print, caricature, comic strips and so forth -- in the museum along with "high," MOMA, under the new curatorial leadership of Kirk Varnedoe, has abandoned its sacred mission of cultural discrimination. The second, and more hip, version: MOMA is too hidebound and elitist an institution to deal with popular culture, or with the recent "high" culture of the '80s, at all. As the clippings pile up, one may expect to see many variations on these themes. One, common to both, is that the show...
...attract more than the usual dose of the New York art world's free-floating anxiety. Art-world anxiety is not like real-world anxiety: it is even more paranoid. What the art world frets about is how Varnedoe, whose appointment as director of painting and sculpture at MOMA has made him America's most powerful museum figure in the modern and contemporary field, will represent all its factional interests. Hence his every action is scrutinized and picked to bits, as Etruscan haruspices once examined sacrificial livers for a sign of the future...
...comic strips and folk scatology. And Philip Guston in the 1970s was able to attain his measure of greatness as a tragic painter only through a free, uncondescending use of motifs from George Herriman's great strip Krazy Kat and the underground comics of Robert Crumb. Nor can MOMA be accused of pandering to mass taste by exhibiting old comic strips, since what mass taste really likes these days is Van Gogh and Picasso...
...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...