HERE IN New York few critics if any will be sorry to see the Museum of Modern Art’s “High & Low” exhibition leave town. Few of the critics in Chicago and Los Angeles, to which it travels next, are likely to receive it with much enthusiasm either. Why do the critics hate this show? What is going on when, like a rare and ominous alignment of the planets, the critics of the New York Times, the New York Observer, and The Journal of Art vilify the exhibition as though with one voice?
“High & Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture” deals with one of the most vexed issues of contemporary cultural discourse—the muddy crossroads where high culture and popular culture meet and interact. Implicit in all of this are a clutch of treacherous questions: Is high culture elitist and arbitrarily defined? Is popular culture better because more democratic? Should museums be addressing such issues at all?
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