Word: museum
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...evolution of the art arbiters' prissy attitude toward comics gradually evolved, thanks in part to Raw magazine, the alternative comics showcase that Spiegelman co-edited. In the early '90s he also convened a summit of museum curators in his Soho studio to help them understand what comics were. And weren't. "Comics are not necessarily trying to do what a Van Gogh on the wall was trying to do," he said. "They aren't the same kind of direct expression. They have something more in common with architectural drawings and set design. They are picture writing that has to function...
...Which is why seeing them on a museum wall is, as Bart Simpson would say, funny in so many ways...
...clear glass of hindsight, we see that the elite should have embraced the very first significant comics artist. That was McCay, who, just 100 years and a month before the Los Angeles museum show opened, published his first full-color page of Little Nemo in Slumberland in the New York Herald. Here was a popular art at its onset and apogee: not a primitive Lascaux cave painting but a Sunday-supplement Hieronymus Bosch - a glorious other-world of dreamscapes as phantasmagorical as they were funny...
...wondering why I withheld this survey until after the exhibition closed, I'll tell you. One reason is that the New York-New Jersey show was far from iddeal. The L.A. museums were a car-drive away, and everyone drives out there. Back here in Manhattan, Newark might as well be New Delhi. As Spiegelman wrote to the show's producers: "While swell for New Jersey residents, placing the first half of the 20th century's comic strip artists into the Newark Museum is, from the perspective of this provincial New Yorker, the equivalent of hiding them in a Federal...
...suspicious about using this show to elevate the pedigree of comics. It's the venue as much as the works that compels visitors to think that a comic strip can be taken as seriously as a Lichtenstein. I agree with Pettibon, who writes, "For fans of comics the Museum of Art is as foreboding and scary a place as the Comics Convention is for lovers of art." As fascinating and as vindicating as it is to see all this wonderful material on museum walls, the enterprise speaks to two slightly neurotic trends in our culture: the need of so-called...