Photography Exhibition: The Metropolitan Museum of Art - The Pictures Generation, 1974–1984

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York City, is one of the premier art museums in the world. When they have a photographic exhibition, you can be sure of its extremely high quality and its careful composition and construction.

This is the first major museum exhibition to focus exclusively on “The Pictures Generation.” Educated in the self-reflexive and critical principles of Minimal and Conceptual art, this tightly knit group of artists brought those lessons to bear on a return to recognizable imagery, exploring how images shape our perceptions of ourselves and the world. Featured are 160 works in all media by thirty artists.

This exhibition will run through August 2, 2009

Young artists who came of age in the early 1970s were greeted by an America suffused with disillusionment from dashed hopes for political and social transformation to the continuation of the Vietnam War and the looming Watergate crisis. The utopian promise of the counterculture had devolved into a commercialized pastiche of rebellious stances prepackaged for consumption, and the national mood was one of catatonic shell-shock in response to wildly accelerated historical change, from the sexual revolution to race riots and assassinations. Similarly, the elder generation of artists seemed to have both dramatically expanded the field of what was possible in the field of art while staking out its every last claim, either by dematerializing the aesthetic object entirely into the realm of pure idea or linguistic proposition as in Conceptualism, or by rivaling the cataclysmic processes and sublime vistas of the natural world itself as did the so-called earthworks artists such as Robert Smithson, who died in 1973.

The exhibition includes works from John Baldessari, Ericka Beckman, Dara Birnbaum, Eric Bogosian, Troy Brauntuch, Sarah Charlesworth, Jack Goldstein, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Richard Prince, David Salle, Cindy Sherman, Laurie Simmons, Michael Zwack and others.

If you’re in the New York City area through August 2nd, I strongly suggest you take in this amazing exhibition.

As I travel, I love seeing the work of other photographers as I hope you do. If you know of a new photographic exhibition which you think the Blog should publicize, please contact me.