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Must avant-garde art hold itself apart from the values and beliefs widely held in the common culture? Must advanced artists always be the symbolic adversaries of the ordinary citizen? These questions have dominated, even paralyzed the modern art world, particularly in recent years when perceived elitism and imposed canons of taste have come under fire from all sides. In this stimulating book, a prominent art historian shows that the links between advanced art and modern mass culture have always been robust, indeed necessary to both. Thomas Crow focuses on the continual interdependence between the two phenomena, providing examples that range from Paris in themid-nineteenth century to the latest revivals of the Conceptual art in the 1990s. Crow's argument proceeds through a series of vividly described episodes: Jackson Pollock being enlisted into the realm of fashion by his first patron; Andy Warhol keeping one foot in a small-town sentiment through his definitive work of the 1960s; an audacious woman artist, Sturtevant, confronting incomprehension and hostility when she turned Pop art tactics against thePop painters themselves (and being vindicated twenty years later by an entirelynew generation of artists); Gerhard Richter's sophisticated painting converging with amateur production in its uses of photography; Gordon Matta-Clark raiding derelict buildings to find the raw material of his sculpture; Ross Bleckner redefining his painting of the 1980s through the decayed, funerary kitsch of Victorian America; Christopher Williams remaking a high Conceptual art with mental maps provided by the tourist industry.

Modern Art in the Common Culture: Essays: Search Results