ART : ‘High & Low’ Slumming : Why a risky and ambitious exploration of the relationship between modern art and popular culture falls flat

The sumptuous debacle that is “High & Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture” should give the Museum of Modern Art serious pause. In fact, just half as much pause as it gives an astonished viewer would suffice. For although the much-touted exhibition ranks as the museum’s resolute attempt to rejoin the lively conversation of contemporary cultural life--a vigorous discussion from which the august institution has been largely absent for well over a decade--the simple truth is this: “High & Low” seems to be talking to no one but itself.

Recently, the museum has undergone a changing of the guard at the high-visibility helm of its department of painting and sculpture, and “High & Low” is that new director’s inaugural presentation. Astonishment that this is his idea of a show that would be of interest to anyone but an academic pedant, one who gets electric jolts of excitement from footnotes more eagerly than from works of art, is matched by the sinking feeling that the museum’s entrenched position as defender of an aging and ever more narrow canon will continue into the foreseeable future. It’s business as usual on 53rd Street.

“High & Low” is a flop, but a flop worth analyzing for a consequential reason. Its subject--the relationship between the individual artistic imagination and the world of popular and commercial culture--demands an expansive rethinking of 20th Century art. That rethinking has provided considerable juice for much of the most substantive American and European art since the 1960s. MOMA, though, has merely tinkered, and in ways that demonstrate just how disengaged this former flagship museum really is.

Since its opening early in October, “High & Low” has been almost universally decried, but not for having been unable to gather together an extraordinary group of paintings and sculptures. The sprawling display, which, after closing in Manhattan on Jan. 15, will travel to the Art Institute of Chicago in February and, in June, to L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art, is rich in works of individual excellence by whole rafts of 20th Century artists: Picasso, Duchamp, Rodchenko, Miro, Brancusi, Cornell, Rauschenberg, Twombly, Warhol, Lichtenstein and more. That’s what makes the debacle sumptuous.

Nor is the disaster due to gross indulgence in shoddy scholarship. To the contrary. Kirk Varnedoe, the new helmsman at MOMA, and Adam Gopnik, art critic for The New Yorker and co-organizer of “High & Low,” have been diligent in unearthing specific sources in popular culture on which artists have drawn. Many are illuminating.

For instance, they’ve dug up copies of the newspapers that Picasso and Georges Braque clipped in making their revolutionary Cubist collages, and they’ve figured out punning references in those clippings. They’ve brought together Francis Picabia’s drawings with exactly those commercial advertisements from which they derived, and they’ve assembled ads designed by Rodchenko for commercial products. Convincing connections between Philip Guston’s figurative paintings and characters in comics by Al Capp and Robert Crumb have been pinpointed, and the comic books are shown in the galleries with the paintings. The curators even trace spiral paths of influence--high into low into high into low, like a twisting snake devouring its tail--that such imagery has sometimes followed.

Varnedoe’s and Gopnik’s assertions are by no means uniformly convincing. When they claim that Picasso’s great, 1906 portrait of a hulking Gertrude Stein, complete with its archaizing simplifications drawn from models in ancient Iberian sculpture, actually ranks as the first great example of the modern influence of caricature on high art, then the term “caricature” has been stripped of functional meaning. For Picasso’s arresting portrait of his intimate friend can be (and has been) called many things, but satirical and ludicrous are not among them.

No, the show bombs for more substantive, structural reasons than occasional flights of art historical fancy. “High & Low” collapses beneath an insistence that the history of art is nothing more than the history of successive styles, and that modern art of the 20th Century is distinguished merely by being the history of highly personal, individual styles.

“Modern art has liberated, as no art has before, the private imagination of the artist,” announces an introductory wall-text. “Yet again and again, modern artists of all kinds have turned for inspiration to the public life around them, and have adopted motifs and styles from commerce, entertainment and the language of the streets.”

Here’s one example of the problem. By the 1940s, abstract painting had come to symbolize the serious commitment of an American avant-garde. In 1966, the widely admired Abstract Expressionist painter Philip Guston began a startling repudiation of abstraction. The curators say, in the show’s big, 460-page book, that his shocking reversal is important because, given the public success of Abstract Expressionism in general, “What Guston needed, like so many damaged and visionary old men, was above all a private style.”

To say Guston’s attraction to mass-produced comics was a search for personal style is not just bizarre, it’s delimiting. Guston’s new figurative art became a touchstone for the epochal shifts of a younger generation for reasons of far greater moment. In repudiating abstraction, he, like they, had begun to question the assumptions on which modern art itself had come to depend.

Would that the curators had followed suit. The exhibition casts the artifacts of popular culture as participating, to a degree, in this quest for personal style. The show is at pains to identify, by name, the designers of these usually anonymous forms. Yet, because the mass appeal of pop artifacts signals the absolute antithesis of individual style, their principal worth is seen to be as available fodder for artistic use. “High & Low” doesn’t really consider the difficult relationship between “Modern Art and Popular Culture.” It’s merely an annotated catalogue, plastered across the museum’s walls, which chronicles “Some Modern Artists and One Among Their Many Sources.”

Twentieth Century artists climbed high, the show proposes, on the exponentially growing mountain of low-culture trash. In the eyes and minds of Varnedoe and Gopnik, popular culture could be colonized by great artists merely because, like Everest, it was there. We’re invited to join them in enjoying the dizzying aesthetic view.

If this thesis sounds crashingly familiar, it’s because its broadest outlines once formed the creation myth of modern American art.

In 1939, the 30-year-old critic Clement Greenberg published his first essay on art. “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” drew on the perceptive ideas of several earlier writers to establish strict boundaries between advanced modern art and the artifacts of popular culture--between “high” and “low.” And in 1961, at precisely the moment those boundaries were about to be fatefully breached--most obviously by a host of young artists whose disparate work was to be gathered under an umbrella called Pop Art--an anthology appeared of Greenberg’s criticism from the past two decades. “Art and Culture,” which led with his essay on the dangers of kitsch, stood on one side of a rift that soon grew into a yawning chasm. Scores of challenging young artists lined up on the other.

In the 1940s and 1950s Greenberg had championed the work of the emerging Abstract Expressionist painters (most notably Jackson Pollock), in writings that elaborated the distinctions first drawn in “Avant-Garde and Kitsch.” Art that made clear and precise the parameters of a medium’s own nature--the flatness of a painting, to cite the most famous example--and nothing more, was successful for expressing moral honesty.

By contrast, artistic illusionism was claimed to be naturally dishonest, false, a masquerade for art. And illusionism, from commercial advertisements to the movies, was the stuff of pop culture kitsch.

Notice the specific terminology Greenberg chose to use, in 1939, as brackets for “Avant-Garde and Kitsch.” While the United States furiously debated its possible entry into a European war, the critic’s remarkable essay made subtly suggestive equations for art. Greenberg lamented that the School of Paris had lost its avant-garde leadership, and he worried whether American artists would be able to pick up the banner. The French term, avant-garde , which had been adapted for modern artists in the 19th Century from the military phrase for an advance-scout team, was equated by the critic with a progressive tradition of moral honesty. Kitsch , which described popular and commercial art, was a slangy--and pointedly German--word that equaled treachery and falsehood.

Greenberg concluded his essay with a discussion of the tactics of Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin and of why they suppressed avant-garde art and championed popular culture, or kitsch. Politically, dictators could benefit by promoting an illusion that the masses actually rule; so the art the masses enjoyed and understood was proclaimed by fascist leaders to be the only true art, while the avant-garde was squelched. (Hitler’s assault on modern art, incidentally, will be the subject of an eagerly anticipated show in February at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.)

In Europe, a battle for the soul of art was on. And if an as-yet immature, American avant-garde was to blossom in any meaningful way, Greenberg believed a prohibition against the “taint” of popular culture was essential.

The critic’s opposing terminology was therefore compellingly descriptive, but hardly neutral. Eventually, cracks formed in the creation myth. Art is not as pure as Greenberg insisted. In retrospect, the use of morally loaded terms to describe cultural products, followed by a claim that those descriptions are somehow “natural,” was plainly contradictory. Since the late 1950s, some of the most compelling art has been engaged in questioning, probing and dismantling this fiction, on which the very ascendance of American art in the postwar years was based.

This is precisely the art which, from Pop and Minimalism onward, the Museum of Modern Art has been most wary about embracing. A great irony in “High & Low” lurks in the near-total lack of self-reflection on the museum’s own role in the subject. The interplay between modern art and popular culture has special meaning for the institution, for MOMA was founded in 1929 with a special goal in mind: to popularize in America the art of the avant-garde, a purpose the museum was to achieve with considerable success in the years that followed.

MOMA had opened its doors within weeks of the great stock market crash, but the timing wasn’t all bad. The Depression turned out to be the era of great, triumphant flowering for most of the mediums of popular culture we now take for granted.

Movies began to talk. Network radio spread singular news and entertainment from coast to coast, and rudimentary experiments in television commenced. For radio (and later TV), effective commercial advertising became the very motive for establishing a broadcast system based on the network principle. Two inventors of new mass-culture forms emerged to wild success: Walt Disney and his animated films in Los Angeles, and Henry Luce and his multiple magazines in New York. And on a smaller but no less ambitious scale, the Museum of Modern Art began to sell the public on the heretofore obscure idea of advanced art and design.

There’s no need to rehearse here the well-known and hugely successful history, from the 1930s on, of MOMA and its innovative touring programs of packaged exhibitions. Let’s just consider one example of the way its shows of modern art were themselves disseminated as mass entertainments.

The museum’s important 1936 exhibition, “Dada, Surrealism and Fantastic Art,” introduced major aspects of the European avant-garde to America. It was also a publicity blockbuster. Newspapers and magazines couldn’t get enough of the outrageous Salvador Dali, and Meret Oppenheim’s sexually suggestive “Object” (a fur-lined teacup) created an uproar. In movie theaters across the country, Paramount and Universal showed newsreels about the exhibition, which itself generated more press locally when it traveled to cities in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Wisconsin, Minnesota and California. Russell Lynes, MOMA’s official biographer, opined that by the end of the tour the fur-lined teacup was probably the best-known single object in America.

Somehow, none of this comes across today in the galleries of “High and Low,” where the infamous teacup is safely ensconced in a case airlessly devoted to the influence of shop-window display on modern sculptors. The museum’s own role as shop-window of a different kind doesn’t come up. Perhaps the severest critic of such an “us” and “them” attitude--and in fact of the exhibition as a whole--is MOMA’s own landmark building, which was elaborately renovated a few years ago. Stand in the new greenhouse atrium for a while, watching streams of visitors glide on sleek escalators up to the permanent collections or down to the show’s basement galleries, and the numbing triviality of the exhibition’s blinkered premise comes immediately into focus. Housed in a building whose architectural style is best described as Shopping Mall Modern, its “revelations” of art’s sources in pop culture feel puny.

Blinkers narrow perspective. Imagine, if you will, the pure folly of attempting to present a definitive thesis on the history of Baroque art and Catholicism without ever going to Rome. Now, recall a lecture given by The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in June, at which the co-curator of a mega-show predicated on an understanding of popular culture allowed as he had never before been to L.A.

Imagine, more fatefully, the destiny of artists working in Los Angeles during the postwar era--decades that saw the final apotheosis of Southern California as pop culture Eden. There’s no need to list (yet again) the artists in L.A. whose work has been grossly underrated during the last four decades. But how could it be otherwise? Since prevailing critical rhetoric had sought to eradicate any taint for the American avant-garde, the better to lift it to prominence over European art after World War II, who could finally champion any new art that was issuing forth from L.A., the crucible of kitsch?

Certainly not the standard-bearing Museum of Modern Art. One Southern Californian is indeed represented in “High & Low.” Among the three early works by the redoubtable Edward Ruscha is a pungent, 1962 word-painting, in Boy Scout blue-and-yellow, that is a classic of the artist’s pioneering fusion of commercial graphic style with established, high art motifs, so crucial to the 1960s. “OOF,” as this imposing canvas is descriptively titled, is the single major painting by Ruscha in MOMA’s all-important permanent collection. It was acquired just two years ago.

OOF, indeed.

MOMA’s traditional myopia goes in two directions. Kirk Varnedoe has added a contemporary coda to his historically minded exhibition, which otherwise pretty much ends with artistic developments in the 1960s. Work by three artists in New York who emerged as important in the 1980s--Elizabeth Murray, Jeff Koons and Jenny Holzer--is shown, in order to suggest that the source-mongering tradition continues.

Worthy artists all. Astonishingly, though, it’s as if the most salient development of the 1980s art world--its internationalization--had never happened. But not only did it happen, it was (and is, because it’s still being played out) intimately caught up in the issue at hand. The stunning return to prominence of European art in the last dozen years stands as the flip side of the smaller, and simultaneous, re-emergence of Los Angeles as a cultural force. For if L.A. was created by the modern era as the great producer of American popular culture, Europe, in the difficult rebuilding of the post-war period, was re-created as its great consumer. Colonizing Europe with America’s image, “the Colonies” returned the favor. Artists on both sides of the Atlantic have worked from that experience for a generation.

At MOMA, though, the smaller story of “Modern Art and Popular Culture” is framed by the larger one the museum has told from the start: In the beginning there was Paris (and a few artistic suburbs, such as Moscow and Berlin), and when that was over there was the island of New York. It’s fine with me if the folks on 53rd Street want to keep flogging that tired tale. But after years of Rip Van Winkle drowsiness, its influence in things contemporary has grown mighty dim.

Indeed, it might be too much to expect a wholesale rewriting of the history of 20th-Century art from the museum, which has a lot at stake in maintaining The Official Story. It’s hardly possible to imagine them fostering a scorched-earth revision that, say, went something like this: Abstract Expressionism wasn’t the fragile beginning of a modern, American avant-garde, but the triumphant end of a European one; on this fresh foundation of a mature American art, the 1960s in New York, Los Angeles and the established capitals of Europe witnessed the early, fitful emergence of something else, something that is still taking shape. Whatever that something might be--Post-Modernism seems to have faded as the aesthetic term of choice--it clearly has to do with experience in an entrepreneurial world of consumable images.

MOMA’s curators began “High & Low” with old convictions about the art of the past, then tried to march forward with the banner. Had they begun with new convictions about the art of the present--convictions tantalizingly, even startlingly announced at the end of the exhibition catalogue--and then looked back to see how we got where we are, they might have enlarged our vision of history. What’s in MOMA’s show today would go where it belongs--into the catalogue, as background--and what is now only suggested in the book’s final chapter (“Contemporary Reflections”) would be fleshed out as a full-scale exhibition. Whether or not visitors to such a show would agree with the museum’s choices about which art of our cultural moment really matters, and why, at least there would be something to sink your teeth into. As it stands, there’s only predigested mush.

“High & Low” amply demonstrates that the Museum of Modern Art isn’t just parochial, which is to be expected of any earth-bound institution. Instead, the ghastly feeling of enervation in the show is caused by a creeping awareness that its long period of disengagement has left the museum painfully, horribly provincial.