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Editorial: Pop and art The Carnegie International is playful yet probing Thursday, November 11, 1999
There's a scene from a "Flintstones" cartoon that may have some application to this year's Carnegie International.
Fred Flintstone, a descendant of a prehistoric Appalachian family, has finally settled his family's feud with another tribe from the old country. To celebrate their hard-won truce, Fred, Wilma, Barney and Betty are invited to dinner at their enemy's tribal compound.
After one too many sips of Cro-Magnon moonshine, Fred turns art critic and comments on a painting of his new- found friends' ancient matriarch. "I don't know what the artist got for painting that picture," he opines, "but he should've got life." That insult, of course, jump-starts the feud all over again.
The last scene is of the four Bedrock sophisticates running down a hill under a hail of buckshot. It's a fitting reward for the quartet's Philistinism and an implicit warning to everyone to be prepared to back up aesthetic judgments with fancy footwork if necessary.
What do old cartoons have to do with the Carnegie International? A lot. Exhibit A is Kerry James Marshall's "RYTHM MASTR," a nonlinear panel strip currently serialized in the Post-Gazette on Tuesdays. Exhibit B is Takashi Murakami's hypersexualized sculptures that reveal the influence of Japanese animation. Exhibit C consists of Kara Walker's cunning silhouettes of 19th-century slave narratives covering the balcony wall of the Hall of Sculpture.
While surveying most of the contemporary art world's most interesting trends and controversies, this year's Carnegie International is indebted to popular culture to an unprecedented degree, hence its attraction for people of all ages who are streaming to see it. Because of the show's humor, pop culture savvy and irreverence for traditional aesthetic categories, it has a powerful appeal to a generation of museum browsers impatient with the status quo.
Although many of the artists represented in recent Internationals are young and relatively new to local audiences, the show itself has had a long and distinguished history. The International's artistic and civic legacy stretches far beyond the Three Rivers, exerting an influence on artists and critics the world over who make a pilgrimage to the Pittsburgh event two or three times a decade.
This should be a source of pride to a city still getting over the consequences of the disappearance of many of its lhistoric icons. Love of artistic innovation has at least partly replaced nostalgia for steel. And judging by the positive response to this year's Carnegie International so far, Pittsburgh's aesthetic sensibility is closer to the cutting edge than many of us has ever dreamed.
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