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Consequently, the show reads as a set of illustrations to the book, for only in the book can the comparison of demotic source with final object be done with the necessary detail. Varnedoe and Gopnik have gone into their subject with vast scholarly elan, mining arcana from the areas where art and life, under the impulse of a modernism striving to refresh itself, are layered. If you want to know what was the catalog model of Marcel Duchamp's urinal, which nursery book Max Ernst got a particular collage element from, or which frame panels from 1962 war comics drawn by Russ Heath were conflated by Roy Lichtenstein to produce Okay, Hot-Shot, 1963, you need look no further.
But the catalog is not a mass of fanzine trivia. It is the indispensable text on its subject, whose every page vibrates with the authors' enthusiasm for the "high," their curiosity about the "low" and their richly inflected sense of the complex traffic between the two. Gopnik and Varnedoe write better than their critics. The next-to-last essay ("Contemporary Reflections," by Gopnik, covering a wide swath from David Salle and Cindy Sherman to the short- lived graffiti movement) is, on its own, the best summary yet written of American art in the '80s.
Yet the art the essay covers is scarcely represented on the walls. Why should these artists be considered worth writing about but not worth showing? You can see why MOMA might object on grounds of quality, since so much of the work was so poor. And you can't put lost subway graffiti in a museum anyway. But to restrict one's coverage of the '80s to Jeff Koons, Jenny Holzer and the admirable Elizabeth Murray is tokenism. If the media-obsessed art of the '80s was worth putting in the catalog it should have been on the walls, if only to illustrate how mass media became gradually exhausted as a topic of fine-art reflection.