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Despite all this, when Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art this winter staged "Word and Image," a poster survey, the artist selected to design the show's theme poster was neither Glaser nor Max. Instead, the museum commissioned a fragile, mop-topped Japanese named Tadanori Yokoo (pronounced Yoko-o), 31. Yokoo's scathing, intricate posters evoke gusty sighs of adulation from Japanese teeny-boppers and relentless demand from ad agencies and art galleries. Yet their themes, while gay, are also brutally nihilistic; they juxtapose Nippon's rising sun and foamy waves with grinning faces, mechanistically bloated nudes and portraits of the Beatles drooling blood. "There has to be a touch of madness and a shadow of death in whatever I find beautiful these days," says Yokoo. "In my mind, the question of what God is and what its relations are with science keeps right on growing."