Art in an Age of Mass Culture

Conceived as a response to the much discussed and now legendary exhibition HIGH & LOW: HIGH ART AND POPULAR CULTURE, a survey of the spectacle of the interaction of consumer culture and the artistic avant-garde which opened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in the fall of 1990, this film explores, in a parallel fashion, those issues initially addressed in the exhibition itself. Structured around a walk-through of the show with its curators Kirk Varnedoe and Adam Gopnik, the film dwells on specific aspects of the dialogue established in the twentieth century between modernism and mass culture, from the collages of Braque and Picasso through the seminal Pop images of Roy Lichtenstein to the LED signs of Jenny Holzer. Interviews with many of the artists included in the exhibition, among them Roy Lichtenstein, Jenny Holzer, Jeff Koons, and Elizabeth Murray, as well as critics enrich the presentation of this subject that is most crucial to an understanding of the art of our time.