Popping Up

THE TATE MODERN'S GRAPHIC EXHIBITION

Pop Life: Art in a Material World," opening this month at London's Tate Modern, and curated by Alison M. Gingeras, Jack Bankowsky, and Catherine Wood, offers a spirited exploration of Andy Warhol's later work and his influence on the generation that followed. Warhol was the rare artist who spun the often antagonistic relationship between art and commerce into a synergistic legacy. "Andy Warhol enabled contemporary artists not just to comment on pop culture but to make culture, to be protagonists in the field," says Gingeras. "The marketplace is their medium as much as paint or silkscreen," adds Bankowsky. "For a long time in the 70s and 80s no one trusted Andy, not even Andy, but from the other side of Koons, Prince, and Murakami, Warhol's three-ring circus of art and self-promotion starts to look like the best picture we have of the world we live in," says Bankowsky. "Our reading of the late work is that Warhol went into the belly of the beast and that, as opposed to a sellout, it was actually a fuller realization of what he called his pop statement." Exhibition highlights include a sampling from Jeff Koons's "Made in Heaven" series, a sampling of works from Damien Hirst's "Beautiful Inside My Head Forever" auction, and Richard Prince's "Spiritual America," as well as Warhol's little-seen "Gems" series installed under ultraviolet light, a site-specific piece by Takashi Murakami, and a re-creation of Keith Haring's "Pop Shop" with things for sale.

A. M. HOMES