Pining for Recognition as High Art

This week in Time, Richard Corliss writes about comics after the closing of the "Masters of American Comics" exhibition at New York's Jewish Museum and the Newark Museum. He's got a lot of interesting things to say, about comics in general and some of the specific artists and comics that appear in the art show. But finally, toward the end of his essay, he answers the question I had about the timing of his piece:

But if you're wondering why I withheld this survey until after the exhibition closed, I'll tell you. One reason is that the New York-New Jersey show was far from iddeal [sic]. The L.A. museums were a car-drive away, and everyone drives out there. Back here in Manhattan, Newark might as well be New Delhi. As Spiegelman wrote to the show's producers: "While swell for New Jersey residents, placing the first half of the 20th century's comic strip artists into the Newark Museum is, from the perspective of this provincial New Yorker, the equivalent of hiding them in a Federal Witness Protection program." The Jewish Museum also censored some of Crumb's more robust drawings, provoking Spiegelman to withdraw his art from the show he had helped inspire.

But mainly, something in me is suspicious about using this show to elevate the pedigree of comics. It's the venue as much as the works that compels visitors to think that a comic strip can be taken as seriously as a Lichtenstein. I agree with [Raymond] Pettibon, who writes, "For fans of comics the Museum of Art is as foreboding and scary a place as the Comics Convention is for lovers of art." As fascinating and as vindicating as it is to see all this wonderful material on museum walls, the enterprise speaks to two slightly neurotic trends in our culture: the need of so-called High Art to reach down, and the need for so-called Low Art to be placed on a pedestal.

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It's akin to the argument that tries to make movies art by defining them as pictures seen on a wall (museum pieces) rather than illustrated stories. Yet Ingmar Bergman and Preston Sturges, to name just two great "directors," are primarily not visual stylists but writers. Similarly, Kurtzman and Spiegelman are remarkable less for their draftsmanship than for conjuring a world and giving it narrative shape, density and bite. You don't see their work so much as you read it.

And just because I'm a stickler for accuracy, and it really annoys me to see easily checked facts misstated in a high-profile venue such as Time, I have to point out that Corliss goes on to incorrectly identify Jack Kirby as the artist on Spider-Man when we all know that it was Steve Ditko. And further, Corliss also mentions that Spider-Man's writer, Stan Lee, is a multimillionaire who owns the copyright on the character. While I don't doubt that Stan has more than one million, it seems to me that Marvel Comics may have felt it important to hold on to Spidey's copyright themselves.

Earlier in the article, Corliss trots out an old quote from Art Spiegelman about Roy Lichtenstein:

"I have all sorts of issues with the idea that a Lichtenstein painting of a comic book panel is art but the original comic panel it draws on is not considered art," he told TIME's Jeanne McDowell for a 2005 story we did on the exhibition. "I hate that whole attitude and way of looking at this stuff. Lichtenstein did for comics what Warhol did for Campbell's Soup - it had nothing to do with comics. It had to do with exploiting the form without any of the content."

I couldn't ask for a better segue. Over on his blog, Eddie Campbell (the From Hell artist, not the country and western singer) was talking just the other day about the issue of borrowing in Lichtenstein.

David Barsalou, whose web site instigated the Globe piece, has amassed 85 pairings of Lichtenstein originals with their comic book panel 'sources'. Showing them side by side like this is useful for an understanding of the iconographic connections, but it does miss the essence of the exercise, that is that Lichtenstein took a tiny picture, smaller than the palm of the hand, printed in four color inks on newsprint and blew it up to the conventional size at which 'art' is made and exhibited and finished it in paint on canvas. In theory it was like painting a view of a building, or a vase. He worked through a long series of the same kind of thing before applying the particular treatments he had devised, such as the mechanical dots, to other kinds of images, ultimately including abstract images as in the brushstroke series. I find his whole project quite astonishing and invigorating. It was good for art. Hell, it was even good for the comic book medium, setting a precedent for it to be taken seriously.

He wrote about it at length, so check out the link. And while you're there, don't miss the stimulating discussion in response to his post in the comments section. Those, in turn, inspired Campbell to respond with a very interesting post earlier today about plagiarism. He's for it.