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Johns and Rauschenberg, then, and Oldenburg, and some Warhol, a good deal of Lichtenstein and a few pieces by Rosenquist and (surprisingly enough, in view of his calamitous recent work) by Jim Dine: such are the survivors. The losers are more numerous.
When pop was at its height in the early '60s, it seemed that nearly every young painter in America was churning out his or her cigarette packets, car grilles, Mickey Mice and talking Coke bottles. The result was a babel to surpass the ceaseless yammer of neons in Times Square. The problem of how to survive in this battering surplus of gratuitous images became acute for the serious artist, especially when the public became surfeited by having its quotidian environment rammed back down its throat, lubricated by an arty sauce.
Banality and Bliss. The truth of certain maxims once thought demode and elitist now reasserts itself: for instance, that a posture of cool boredom can in itself become boring; that a perfunctory infatuation with the signs and portents of "masscult" means nothing unless it is subjected—as by Oldenburg—to a profound change and rethinking; that banality is not always imaginative bliss. And if one happens to find sense in these propositions, it is hard to take all that seriously the marginal artists whose work Alloway has selected. Their work may have this or that to do with signs, but on aesthetic grounds it varies between limpness and indulgent kitsch, typified by the show's California contingent, Joe Goode, Ed Ruscha and Mel Ramos.
Goode's constructed fragments of staircases are among the emptiest works of art ever to travel east of the Rockies, and Ruscha's variations on the painted word-as-object, which derive from Jasper Johns, are so cute that Alloway's normal eloquence is reduced to calling them "deceptively obvious." In fact, their obviousness is not deceptive; it is just obvious. And Ramos, whose Batmen and Playboy Bunnies go as far as pop ever went in unctuous, opportunistic triviality, seems to be in the show merely to illustrate an amusing feedback loop between pop and commercial art. In 1962, at the peak of the Batman revival, Ramos got some mileage from painting the masked hero of Bob Kane's comic strip. Four years later, a Batman comic returned the compliment by illustrating a pop exhibition in the Gotham City museum; on the wall were paintings clearly meant to look like Ramos' own.
Despite these and other longueurs, this is a worthy show. Alloway has succeeded where many previous critics failed, by clarifying the issues of pop and reminding us that the time of generalization is past. There is no honest way of rejecting or accepting the whole of pop, but it is useful to note how its good works survive as aesthetic objects and not brassy manifestoes of Yankee materialism.
Robert Hughes