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        Robert Mapplethorpe at Sean Kelly is the Daily Pic by Blake Gopnik

        Queer Culture

        Robert Mapplethorpe used old forms for forbidden content.

        Blake Gopnik

        Updated Jul. 12, 2017 12:18PM ET / Published Jan. 20, 2014 4:44PM ET 

        (Image courtesy Sean Kelly, New York, ©Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation; used by permission)

        Who else could this shot be by than Robert Mapplethorpe? It’s a 1980 image titled “Leather Crotch”, and it’s in the Mapplethorpe survey now at Sean Kelly gallery in New York. I visited with a smart artist and an art-historian friend, and somehow we got caught up in the same-old Mapplethorpe debate: Is his aesthetic too conservative and Edward Weston-ish for its own good, or can we ignore that because of the radical subjects he shoots? Afterward, I realized the obvious solution to the (non-)issue: Mapplethorpe’s art matters most when it uses the old Modernist tropes to display his new subjects. Finding a new, radical language to show bondage gear would have been almost a capitulation to the sidelining that gay culture had suffered for decades; by using the established language of elite art, Mapplethorpe could insist on a retrospective insertion of gay culture into the aesthetic mainstream. He could be the proverbial wolf in sheep’s clothing, while saying that wolfskin is in.

        For a full visual survey of past Daily Pics visit BlakeGopnik.com/archive.

        READ THIS LIST

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