Pop Art then and now.

IN THE early 1960s, the giggle installed itself firmly in art. It was then that art dealers began selling crudely executed images drawn from the funny pages and advertising supplements to the hip and credulous. It was then that such well-known artistic entrepreneurs as Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and Roy Lichtenstein emerged with their signature wares; stacks of Brillo boxes, paintings of soup cans and targets, American flags and comic strips. It was then, in short, that Pop Art arrived, just in time to usher in the Sixties, decade of indulgence and the higher fatuousness.

While the sensibility that Pop Art inaugurated--brittle, mocking, narcistic--is still very much with us, the phenomenom of Pop Art itself is now history. It is hardly surprising that the art establishment should have bestirred itself to produce its standard encomium: a retrospective exhibition. And how perfectly characteristic that the world's largest exhibition of Pop Art never mounted, now in the Museum Ludwig in Cologne (January 23 to April 19) and on it's way to the Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid (June 16 to September 24), should have opened in that most staid and stately of exhibition galleries, London's Royal Academy of Arts, founded by Sir Joshua Reynolds, a pillar of eighteenth-century English art and the first president of the Royal Academy. He who insisted that artists must submit to "the rules of art established by the practive of the Great Masters" cannot have smiled kindly on the presence of Andy Warhol's silk-screened images of Marilyn Monroe or Claes Oldenberg's soft "sculptures" of ladies' shoes in the halls of Burlington House.

And that is the least of it. This sprawling collection of 250 objects--paintings, sculpture, collages--includes works by the full roster of Pop Art stars from Richard Hamilton and Peter Blake through Jasper Johns and H.C. Westermann. Orgnized by Marco Livingstone, a leading Pop Art aficionado, and Norman Rosenthal, exhibitions secretary of the Royal Academy, the exhibition is intended to be a chronological overview of the development of Pop Art from its inception in the late 1950s out of neo-Dada and advertising art.

It is well begin by reminding ourselves exactly what we are dealing with here. Jenny Holzer, for example, weighed in with Truism, an LED display that continually flashed such galvanizing observations as A MAN CAN'T KNOW WHAT IT'S LIKE TO BE A MOTHER and CONFUSING YOURSELF IS A WAY TO STAY HONEST. Mike Kelley contributed a tawdry ensemble of five stuffed animals arranged around a blanket. And there was Jeff Koons, who currently has an X-ray show on view in New York's Sonnabend Gallery in SoHo, offering viewers polychromed figurines of a smiling papa bear and mama bear holding hands and waving. Truly, a thing of beauty is a joy forever.

What Messrs. Livingstone and Rosenthal have given us, in fact, is a chaotic agglomeration of bad art, only some of which qualifies as Pop. Nor are their efforts without a polemical or revisionist edge, expressed mainly in the claim that London deserves parity with New York as the cradle of Pop. Some distinction, you might say. But the historical record requires us, alas, to reserve the honor largely for New York. What came to be called Pop Art (the term was first used by the British critic Lawrence Alloway in 1958) emerged gradually in the mid Fifties from a potpourri of art movements. There were British and European antecedents and anticipations, but Pop Art really established itself as such only after an exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York in 1962. This exhibition of "new realists" (as they were then know) first brough together Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenberg, Andy Warhol, Peter Blake, and subsequent Pop Art grandees.

AT the center of the Pop sensibility is an attack on seriousness, in life as well as art. As one contributor to the exhibition catalogue put it, in the Pop era "the mood was 'party.'" If Pop Art provided a jokey alternative to the sometimes lugubrious rigors of Abstract Expressionism--a breath of fresh air, it seemed, after all those tortured disquisitions on the meaning of paint--it also represented a deliberate rejection of aesthetic discrimination and artistic quality. Pop was brazenly demotic, unabashedly anti-hierarchical: it gloried in kitsch and exalted bad taste. Pop Art was art with its thumb affixed firmly to the nose.

Nevertheless, large claims have been made for the aesthetic, existential, and even political merits of Pop Art. Thus we have Mr. Livingstone nattering on about "a sense of the tragic" in Andy Warhol's image of Marilyn Monroe and "the classicism of Lichtenstein's studied formality and emotional reticence." Remember that this is about a course silk-screen and a blown-up comic-strip image. Similarly, we find Richard Hamilton's collage Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing? (1956) described as "comparable in importance to Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon in relation to Cubism," which is pretty much like saying that Popeye is "comparable in importance" to The Venus of Urbino for Renaissance painting. And then we have Andrew Graham-Dixon, an art critic for the Independent, the London newspaper that helped sponsor the exhibition, telling us that "The major works of Pop Art continue to define the quality of modern life." Extraordinary, isn't it, that Mr. Graham-Dixon should have been full of praise for the exhibition that his employer sponsored?

One thing that we hear over and over again is that Pop Art is a "subversive force" that "challenges" or undermines the "hegemony" of the art world, capitalist "commodification," etc., through parody and spoof. The rhetoric is as unlovely as the idea. Typical is the observation by Sarat Majaraj in the exhibition catalogue that "Pop Art appears as a subversive force emanating from within the very consumerist myths and representations that it calls into question."

Pop Art is bad art, to be sure; it may even be malevolent in its blithe contempt for aesthetic quality and tradition. But exploitation is not criticism, and Pop Art is no more a "critique" of consumerism than is Michael Jackson. This point was made with consumate insouciance by Larry Rivers, surely on of the most clear-sighted and honest artists to be included in the Pop Art exhibition. In a recent interview published in the British quarterly Modern Painters, Mr. Rivers asked: "Are we including Lichtenstein in this anti-materialism? Roy lives down the street here. He's got a big house, he's got a ranch in Scotland, cars. I don't want to hear any of that horse s---."

Andy Warhol once described Dada and Pop Art as "synonyms." But while Pop Art is unimaginable without Dada, there are important differences between the two. This was something that Marcel Duchamp, the father of Dada, understood clearly. In the early decades of the century, Duchamp had scandalized the art world with his "ready-mades," everyday objects torn from their usual contexts and exhibited as art. He presented the public with an ordinary bottle rack or garden rake and said, "This is art!" The public believed him. Even more shocking was Fountain, the gleaming white urinal that Duchamp had the audacity to exhibit as art. It all seems rather tame today. But Duchamp's innovations, amounting to an attack on the very idea of art, mapped out virtually all of the moves that Pop Art, conceptual art, and their myriad offshoots have subsequently exploited and codified.

In my view, Duchamp represents one of the greatest disasters in the history of twentieth-century art. If his Dadaist antics finally seemed amusing and even liberating in a world where "art talk" had become altogether too somber and self-absorbed, his influence has been almost wholly pernicious. What Duchamp teaches is nihilism masquerading as impishness. Nevertheless, having perpetrated so many himself, Duchamp knew an art-world fraud when he saw one. And in the phenomenon of Pop Art he recognized the bad faith of those who exploit the gestures of radicalism while embracing the perquisites of conventional success. Late in life, Duchamp called attention to this, noting that

This Neo-Dada, which they call New Realism, Pop Art, Assemblage, etc., is an easy way out and lives on what Dada did. When I discovered ready-mades, I thought to discourage aesthetics. In Neo-Dada they have taken my ready-mades and found aesthetic beauty in them. I threw the bottle rack and the urinal into their faces as a challenge and now they admire them for their aesthetic beauty.

Duchamp hoped Dada would be a dead end--as indeed it was, aesthetically, spiritually, intellectually. But he underestimated the credulousness of the public and inventiveness of art-world entrepreneurs: together they showed that a great deal of money and social cachet can be found in a dead end. It is no doubt true that art can be about a great many things besides beauty and craftsmanship. The art which we call "sublime" or "profound" or "challenging" or "interesting" often makes no claim to being beautiful or well made. It is not at all clear, however, that art can entirely dispense with beauty and craft without degenerating into a species of anti-art. That was the fate--indeed, it was the announced goal--of Dada, Surrealism, and other twentieth-century movements. The mammoth exhibition of Pop Art now making the rounds reminds us that Pop Art shares this fate. Anyone who believes that this doesn't much matter should recall Andy Warhol's demand that "artists who aren't very good should become like everybody else so that people would like things that aren't very good. It's already happening." Yes, Andy, it is.

Mr. Kimball writes for The New Criterion.