High and Low : Modern Art and Popular Culture

Excerpt from the Foreword: "High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture" continues a tradition that has been important to The Museum of Modern Art throughout its history: thematic exhibitions that examine the fundamental premises of modern art, and link the innovations of its pioneers to the explorations of younger, contemporary artists. This kind of exhibition is particularly demanding, and the present project, so ambitious and heterogeneous in its scope, was only made possible by the dedication of an extraordinary number of individuals and institutions. Excerpt from the Introduction: Our goal is to examine the transformations through which modern painters and sculptors have made new poetic languages by reimagining the possibilities in forms of popular culture; and, as a corollary, to acknowledge the way those adaptations in modern art have found their way back into the common currency of public visual prose. To demonstrate that process, we will focus on aspects of style, including small items like sans-serif typefaces or Benday dots, and broader strategies such as gigantism or the mind-arresting transformation of objects.