Pop Shop (Keith Haring). Courtesy of the National Gallery of Canada.

By Mike Levin

There is a new academic debate about whether context – usually written text that accompanies a piece of visual art – heightens or lessens one’s appreciation of that piece. Apparently we all have an internal concept of what art means, and our judgments are based on seeing, not reading. The National Gallery of Canada, however unintentionally, wades right into the issue this summer with Pop Life, perhaps the most contextual exhibit it has ever staged.

Pop Life will stage approximately 250 works of 14 mostly Anglo-World artists (context alert!). While the pieces span the late 1970s to the present, the main focus is the 1980s when people like Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst decided to reduce Marshall McLuhan’s 1964 statement “the medium is the message” to the artist is the message. Why and how this happened is what the exhibit is all about.

Jonathan Shaughnessy. Photo by Mike Levin.

“That’s the thing about this show – how it will be read,” says Jonathan Shaughnessy, the National Gallery’s lead curator on Pop Life, which has as its tag line the relationship between contemporary art and media marketing. He gives an excellent précis of historical precedents of creative commercialization in his blog, and he is a bit concerned that too much context might distract viewers. Could it produce cynicism about embracing a perceived sell-out of art?

“I can’t really speak to this except to say this is not a critical look at the artists, denouncing them in any way. For example, Pop Shop (a recreation of Keith Haring’s London store where he sold multiple, often-signed, copies of his design memorabilia) is not negative at all. It’s actually uplifting, a lot of fun,” Shaughnessy says.

NGC organizers have made an interesting addition to the show that opened last year in London, U.K. and ran earlier this year in Germany. They have added as juxtaposition, the work of Canada’s General Idea, the trio of AA Bronson, Jorge Zontal and Felix Partz (all pseudonyms) whose conceptual art from 1967 to 1994 was, arguably, this country’s most subversive.

“In a way, General Idea did predict all this, you know, that dada-ist style that subverts to make a statement. The Warhols and Koons were the opposite by their willingness to play within the mainstream,” Shaughnessy says.

General Idea. Courtesy of AABronson.com.

AA Bronson will be part of a panel that discusses Pop Life on June 12 at 1 pm in the Gallery’s Auditorium. Other panelists include co-curator Jack Bankowsky, also editor-at-large of Artforum magazine; Alison M. Gingeras, chief curator of the Francois Pinault Collection; and Thomas Crow, the Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts.

Pop Life will offer many other bells and whistles. Bankowsky and Gingeras will give a tour of on June 11 at 12:15 pm. Robert Enright, of Border Crossings Magazine, and  Blake Gopnik, chief art critic for the Washington Post, will debate contemporary art and Pop Life on June 17 at 7 pm in the Auditorium. Shaughnessy will offer his own tour June 25 at 12:15 pm.  Scott Rothkopf, curator of the Whitney Museum of American Art, will discuss the work of Koons on June 26 at 2 pm, also in the Auditorium.  And there will be three films about the show’s artists: Ugly Beauty (2009) August 5, 7 pm; The Universe of Keith Haring (2008) August 12, 7 pm; and The Jeff Koons Show (2004) August 19, 7 pm, all at the Gallery.

Some of these events have additional charges; some are simultaneously translated into French or have bilingual question periods. See the show’s Web page for more details.

Spiritual America (Brooke Shields by Richard Prince). Courtesy of the NGC.

One of the most interesting comments about Pop Life came from a review by The Guardian’s Laura Cumming, who wrote “Pop Life deserves to be a hit, though, because it tries so hard to get the genie back into the bottle – to distil, as far as possible, a whole chapter of modern times in which a particular kind of art turned itself into pure commodity.”

This intriqued Shaughnessy. “Maybe it is a bit like a Pandora’s Box. I think we’re opening up interest in not what artists put into their work but what people use it for. The critical point is that we do away with the idea that artists have to stand outside the market.”

In this way Pop Life foreshadows It Is What It Is: Recent Acquisitions of New Canadian Art, the National Gallery’s October display of what it has spent money on. It is a refreshing transparency, and perhaps a corollary of Pop Life, explaining what the market is and how it works – a modern take on the status of art strategy.

Pig (Jeff Koons). Courtesy of the NGC.

Shaughnessy explains that within western culture, art has had to engage the market since the Pop-Life era. The summer show is, after all, just another form of entertainment, with high production values, self-promotion and rampant curiosity. Maybe context will help people understand what happened to art during the past 30 years; maybe not. “We hope it seduces people into artistic thought,” Shaughnessy says. “But if your expectations are for over-the-top (visuals), then you’ll get it.

Pop Life opens June 11 and runs until September 19. Tickets are $15.