School of Pop: Thomas Crow on the class of '57

ArtForum, Oct, 2004 by Thomas Crow

It may indeed be difficult to bridge the gap between the stellar art-historical stature of the figures reviewed at the outset of this essay and the near-total eclipse of the specific case of Ark, numbers 18 to 20. But it may be precisely this gap that matters most. One's confidence in the notion of Pop art, post-1960, as a distinct historical phase recedes the more one perceives it as the repetition of familiar fine-art moves. The cohort involved in Coleman's Ark can offer as a counterexample something genuinely different: a carelessly youthful exploitation--both as expert consumers and disinterested producers--of opportunities revealed by the advances of mid-twentieth-century media and technology. They diverted into the stuff of the common culture a cultivated self-consciousness normally monopolized by fine-art refinement--and in that brief achievement effected a paradoxical return to that prelapsarian state before "royal" aspirations seized the definition of art.

Thomas Crow is director of the Getty Research Institute and a contributing editor of Artforum.