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The idea that "low" sources somehow debase the integrity of "high" art is moonshine, of course. It always has been: Goya's Caprichos, for instance, draw heavily on folk proverbs, crude popular drama and 18th century (mainly English) caricature. Miro was inspired by 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.
The show's problems lie elsewhere. The first is the subject's diffuseness, its almost limitless size. Gopnik and Varnedoe have taken four categories to look at: graffiti, caricature, advertising and the comics. But what about the movies, TV or photography? One can sympathize with the curators' problem: any story must have a narrative core, and to secure one this account has been heavily edited. Nevertheless one misses references to these forms -- even though, if exhibited with any density, they would have made the show unendurably prolix.
The size of the subject virtually ensures that the kind of narrative Gopnik and Varnedoe present works better in the catalog than on the walls. In fact, it is hard to see how any museum installation -- linear and one-track by + nature -- could convey a real sense of the peculiar eddies of cultural flux and reflux that they have set out to describe. Abstract Expressionism, for instance, tended to set itself above popular culture -- yet one of its true icons, De Kooning's 1950 study for Woman, had a smile cut from an ad for Camel cigarettes. The work does not appear in the show. There are shallow passages: the bay devoted to Russian Constructivism, Futurism and the Bauhaus, for instance, is mingy. Yet many excellent works of art proliferate, from Cubist collages to exquisite, large-scale paintings by Cy Twombly and some of Robert Rauschenberg's early combines, like Rebus, 1955; from James Rosenquist's room- size F-111, 1964-65, and a reassembly of some of the passionate, gaudy fragments from Claes Oldenburg's Store of 1961-62 to Brancusi's phallic bronze, Princess X, 1916, and one of the greatest of all Legers, The City, 1919.
Nevertheless, though the show affords plenty of opportunity for aesthetic enjoyment, it is about argument, and works of art don't "argue" in a discursive way. Meanwhile the lost environment of popular culture to which they relate can only get into the museum as emblematic snippets, without the casual encircling power it once had. To popular culture the '70s are already medieval and the century's teens virtually Pleistocene. The curators do their best with this, reprinting front pages of Parisian newspapers that Picasso, Braque and Gris cut their collage materials from, or hanging photographs of the kinds of shopwindow display that, they persuasively argue, reinforced the cult of the Surrealist object in the '20s. But the effort to put long-gone popular culture in a museum is like trying to resurrect an old perfume in a room.