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After being closed for displaying a nude photograph of Brooke Shields at 10, Pop Life, a new show celebrating the art of selling out reopens at the Tate Modern. VIEW OUR GALLERY
We whooshed up to the opening of Pop Life: Art in the Material World on the fourth floor of the Tate Modern, got out and were immediately confronted by Jeff Koons’ Rabbit, aka The Brancusi Bunny, alongside Andy Warhol in a fright wig. To its left was a video of the 2007 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York City in which, floating above the crowd was, the Brancusi Bunny, now a 53-footer.
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Pop Life, which runs through January 17, 2010, was originally to have been called Sold Out and it is another sign of Art Power that unhappy artists had it retitled. The idea was brought to the Tate by Jack Bankowsky of Artforum. Catherine Wood of the Tate says “the original proposal was much broader. It was on this theme but with more artists, bigger.”
The theme being? Well, moving on through, the agenda of Pop Life became clearer, if not simpler, because it’s not so simple. The Warholiana, and there’s lots of it around, does not include the classic Elvis and Liz humdingers, rather diamond-dusted portraits of Josef Beuys and such examples of the routinely trashed late works as the Mick Jagger portrait.
A Warhol Blackgama ad is included, as are a 1986 ad in which he is photographed sitting in front of a self-portrait. The caption reads: “I THOUGHT I WAS TOO SMALL FOR DREXEL BURNHAM.” Also the episode of the soap, The Love Boat, in which he appeared. This was Warhol’s zenith so far as getting through to the mass audience went.
The catalogue notes that this was produced by Douglas Kramer, but not that Kramer was a major art collector. Pop Life is kept aloft by an interweave of such connections between the art world and its financial support systems. It suddenly seems relevant that the show on the floor below Pop Life was showing the collection of UBS, the Swiss bank, that discontinued its art banking earlier this year, and which is now being pressured by the US to divulge details on a list of private clients. And, for that matter that the Drexel Burnham ad came out the year before the company was indicted for insider trading. This lead to their bankruptcy and the subsequent non-award of the 1990 Turner Prize in, um, the Tate. Pop Life sensitizes you to the survival systems of Art in the Material World.
John Talks Joe
Lloyd Grove is editor at large for The Daily Beast. He is also a frequent contributor to New York magazine and was a contributing editor for Condé Nast Portfolio. He wrote a gossip column for the New York Daily News from 2003 to 2006. Prior to that, he wrote the Reliable Source column for the Washington Post, where he spent 23 years covering politics, the media, and other subjects.
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Jacob Bernstein is a senior reporter at The Daily Beast. Previously, he was a features writer at WWD and W Magazine. He has also written for New York magazine, Paper, and The Huffington Post.
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Mr. Guest - No Dash Snow???? Was Mr. Bankowsky not aware of the seminal contributions this artist made to Lower East Side culture (with his 'Bowery Boys' buddies) that you and several of your Daily Beast confreres REPEATEDLY reminded us of.
Perhaps his work is being withheld pending the worldwide retrospective that is no doubt in the serious bidding stage for one-off corporate sponsorship. My mistake!
All to the glory of the self cannibalizing Art movements that feed on a continuing decline into Sex sells theorem and nothing sells more than controversy. One can only wonder at the giddy laughter one hears at art openings which is the highest approval,excepting of course the unreal purchase price for nothing of value which sums up the vacuum of so many modern creative efforts . Art critics and writers who chronicle this sick circus are like Vampiric clowns.
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