High Way Robbery

Author(s):  
Michael Dooley

This chapter includes a 1990 review of High and Low: Modern Art, Popular Culture by graphic design journalist Michael Dooley. His critique of the exhibit as seen in Los Angeles: “The show failed, and not simply by the standards of right- and left-wing axe-grinders. More importantly, and sadder still, it failed on its own terms. The show’s attendees never arrived at an interchange; instead, they were stuck on a one-way drive up the high road.” This chapter discusses specific works of art, comics, and advertising and contains an overview of the surrounding art world politics. Images: 2 exhibit photos (MoMA), 3 ads referencing pop culture.  This chapter also includes the essay “My Way along the High Way.” This is a 2017 essay by graphic design journalist Michael Dooley, written as an afterword to his 1990 article "High Way Robbery” about High and Low: Modern Art, Popular Culture and its legacy. This afterword discusses ongoing interaction between pop culture and fine art, specifically Jeff Koons, Ed Ruscha, R. Crumb, Harvey Kurtzman, Art Spiegelman, and the exhibition Masters of American Comics.

This is a brief interstitial introduction by art historian Kim A. Munson explaining the importance of and interaction between two blockbuster exhibitions featuring comics, High and Low: Modern Art, Popular Culture (MoMA, 1990) and Masters of American Comics (Hammer & Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2005). This chapter discusses The Comic Art Show (Whitney, 1983), Jonah Kinigstein’s satirical cartoons about the NY art world, and the critical and public dialogue surrounding both High and Low and Masters, which has shaped many of the comics exhibitions that followed. This chapter tracks the team of comics advocates that organized The Comic Art Show (John Carlin, Art Spiegelman, Brian Walker, and Ann Philbin), their reactions to High and Low and the production of Masters of American Comics in response.


Author(s):  
John Carlin

This chapter includes a 1990 review of MoMA’s High and Low: Modern Art, Popular Culture by cultural entrepreneur John Carlin, co-curator of The Comic Art Show (Whitney, 1983) and curator of Masters of American Comics (Hammer, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2005).  This chapter discusses the differences between fine art and pop culture,the importance of excluded topics like jazz, video, and film, and how pop culture is environmental. Carlin explains: “Pop culture is ugly, rude, sexist, racist and politically naive. Fine art is obscure, elitist, misogynist and has no politics. Obviously they were made for each other.”


2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-64
Author(s):  
Figen Girgin

Repetition or interpretation in art is based on very old times. Much earlier repetition than mechanical copying was often done for master-apprentice teaching or for eye-training purposes. Copying in the mechanical way allows the production of similarities, while copying in digital mode allowed more circulation and access of similarities. From the 20th century, the work of art has become more accessible. The artworks exhibited in various parts of the world, in museums and galleries, reach other artisans or art buyers who are miles away from them, or they are welcomed in their living spaces. The original was now in distribution with copies. A similar situation is both faster and more common today in the Internet age. A similar situation is both faster and more common today in the Internet age. Warhol, on the other hand, puts a consumption object in the art world, which does not deny mechanic reproduction, but already has a graphic design and copies with it. A soup box with thousands of copies is exhibited alone or with copies of it. It shows that art and life are intertwined or that he don’t reject the popular culture-consumption conception in their society in the age of living. The graphic design of soup boxes with thousands of copies has been repeated by Warhol and won the original with his signature in the art. These paintings are reproduced both by his contemporaries and by artists today. An artwork that is actually a copy, can it give the same effect when it is repeated? How do original, unique, copy, reappear in Campbell's Soup Cans? Why and how has Campbell's Soup Cans been repeated in art? In this research, these questions were tried to be answered through the works of the artists who recreated Campbell's Soup Boxes. ​Extended English summary is in the end of Full Text PDF (TURKISH) file. Özet Sanatta tekrar etme ya da yorumlama çok eskilere dayanmaktadır. Mekanik yolla kopyalamadan çok daha önce tekrarlama çoğunlukla usta-çırak öğretisi ya da gözü eğitme amacıyla gerçekleştirilirken; mekanik yolla kopyalama benzerlerin üretilmesine, dijital yolla kopyalama ise benzerlerin daha fazla dolaşımına ve erişimine olanak sağladı. 20. yüzyıldan itibaren sanat yapıtı daha kolay ulaşılır hale geldi. Dünyanın çeşitli yerlerinde, müze ve galerilerde sergilenen sanat yapıtları, onlardan kilometrelerce ötede olan başka sanatçılara ya da sanat alıcılarına ulaşabildi ya da yaşam alanlarında karşılarına çıktı. Orijinal, artık kopyaları ile birlikte dağılımdaydı. Benzer durum, internet çağındaki günümüzde hem daha hızlı hem de daha yaygındır. Ancak Warhol tüm bunların ötesinde, mekanik kopyalamayı yadsımadan, hali hazırda bir grafik tasarıma sahip ve kopyaları ile birlikte dolaşımda olan bir tüketim nesnesini, sanat dünyasına sokar. Binlerce kopyası olan bir çorba kutusunu tek başına ya da onun kopyaları ile birlikte sergiler. Sanat ve yaşamı iç içe geçirir ya da yaşadığı çağda, kendi toplumundaki popüler kültür-tüketim anlayışını reddetmediğini gösterir. Binlerce kopyaya sahip olan çorba kutularının grafik tasarımı, Warhol tarafından tekrarlanarak, onun imzası ile orijinalik kazanmıştır. Onun çorba kutuları resimleri ise hem çağdaşları hem de günümüzdeki sanatçılarca tekrarlanmaktadır. Zaten kopya olan bir asıl, tekrarlandığında aynı etkiyi verebilir mi? Orijinallik, özgünlük, kopya, tekrar Campbell’s Çorba Kutuları’nda ne şekilde ortaya çıkar? Campbell’s Çorba Kutuları sanatta niçin ve ne şekilde tekrarlanmıştır? sorularına Warhol’un Campbell’s Çorba Kutuları adlı resmi ve bu resmi tekrarlayan sanatçıların yapıtları üzerinden cevap aranmaya çalışılmıştır.


Author(s):  
David M. Ball

This chapter argues that the history of physical, juxtaposed displays of comics and art in museum and gallery settings embodies curatorial containment strategies that perpetually fail. To pursue this claim is at the same time to assert that comics’ entrance into the art world, rather than a function of a postmodern turn and its contemporary reckoning, has been ongoing since the 1890s. To sketch this 130-year history, the chapter analyzes three key exhibitions in which museums and galleries have been unable to either fully disavow or fully integrate the connections between comics and art, comics as art, in the past century: the 1913 Armory Show, 1990’s “High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture” at MoMA, and the 2013 exhibition of Ad Reinhardt’s comics alongside his black cruciform paintings at the David Zwirner Gallery.


Author(s):  
Anthony Macías

I am writing this analytical appreciation of cultura panamericana, or pan-American culture, to propose a wider recognition of how its historical linkages and contemporary manifestations confront colonialism, honor indigenous roots, and reflect multiple, mixed-race identities. Although often mediated by transnational pop-culture industries, expressive cultural forms such as art and music articulate resonant themes that connect US Latinos and Latinas to Latin Americans, pointing the way toward a hemispheric imaginary. In US murals, for example, whether in the Chicago neighborhood of Pilsen or the Los Angeles neighborhood of Highland Park, pan-American expressive culture offers alternative representations by embracing indigeneity, and it creates a sense of place by tropicalizing urban spaces.


Język Polski ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 100 (3) ◽  
pp. 100-112
Author(s):  
Jakub Bobrowski

The article explores the semantic and pragmatic evolution of the lexical unit "badylarz" (‘vegetable gardener’). The author challenges the generally accepted opinions about its history, making use of data from dictionaries, digital libraries and corpora of the Polish language. It is commonly believed that the word came into existence during the PRL era and belonged to the typical elements of the discourse of communist propaganda. An analysis of the collected data showed that the word "badylarz" existed as far back as the second half of the 19th century. Originally, it was a neutral lexeme, but in the interwar period it became one of the offensive names of class enemies, often used in left-wing newspapers. After the war, negative connotations of the word were disseminated through literature and popular culture. Nowadays, "badylarz" functions as the lexical exponent of cultural memory of communist times.


Author(s):  
Laurence Maslon

A generational change at the beginning of the twenty-first century intersected with the technological advance of the Internet to provide a renaissance of Broadway music in popular culture. Downloading playlists allowed the home listener to become, in essence, his/her own record producer; length, narrative, performer were now all in the hands of the consumer’s personal preference. Following in the footsteps of Rent (as a favorite of a younger demographic), Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton emerged as the greatest pop culture/Broadway musical phenomenon of the twenty-first century; its cast album and cover recording shot up near the top of music’s pop charts. A rediscovery of the power of Broadway’s music to transform listening and consumer habits seems imminent with the addition of Hamilton and Dear Evan Hansen to a devoted fan base—and beyond.


2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 120-128
Author(s):  
Ondina Pires

One of the figures that stood out the most in the British punk counterculture scene, from 1976 to 1978, was the charismatic vocalist of Sex Pistols, Johnny Rotten, who shouted "Anarchy in the United Kingdom" or "There is no Future". As soon as the musical project devised by the late Malcom McLaren ended in 1978, Johnny Rotten returns to his baptismal name, John Lydon, and starts the experimental musical project Public Image Ltd, better known as PIL.Meanwhile, after about forty-one years of PIL's existence, John Lydon, residing in Los Angeles, USA, in 2020, made public his opinions about former American President Donald Trump, which were a reason for scandal and shock, especially among punk aficionados, most of whom are anti-racists and of left-wing political tendencies.Through this text and the caricatures we can observe a decadent trajectory of a musician who, apparently, is located in the antipodes of 1977. However, this turning point is legitimized by the political and cultural “gaps” of Democracy, a system that is always in danger precisely for its openness to different political views and to the continuous dialogue between ideological forces, often opposed. By using an “anarchy-fascism” dialectic, the author's points of view, based on films, songs and thinkers, evolve throughout her analysis. The aim is to open doors for broader analyzes in relation to democracy that do not contemplate the “black and white” view of the majorities in relation to current politics.


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