The Easel

19th December 2017

Artifacts from the Now: Stephen Shore’s MoMA retrospective

A key idea behind Pop art was to depict everyday reality, unprettified. Having hung around Warhol’s ‘factory’ in New York it was natural that Shore would bring this radical aesthetic into his photography. He helped create a “new photographic vernacular: a flat, deadpan aesthetic that thrives on the deliberate blandness of its subject matter and a rejection of artistic conventions.”

This painting might be sexually disturbing. But that’s no reason to take it out of a museum

Balthus had a thing about adolescent girls. Amid the furor about sexual abuse and #MeToo, should New York’s Met comply with a petition and take down an apparently lascivious work? Definitely not, according to this writer. Art is full of sexual imagery. “The danger in the wings is a new Puritanism … The challenge now is to define codes of behavior without throwing out the maps that got us to the place we are now.”