Art & Exhibitions
At the Jewish Museum, Pop Art and TV Lock Lips
THE DAILY PIC: Pop art touches a Beatles TV stage, not two years after Pop's birth.
Blake Gopnik
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THE DAILY PIC (#1356): It’s standard to imagine that avant-garde art has a trickle-down effect, eventually touching the mass of pop culture. I’ve often claimed it – and never completely believed it. Often, the worlds of fine and popular art have been pretty separate playing fields. But the exhibition called “Revolution of the Eye”, at the Jewish Museum in New York, shows how, for a few years in the 1950s and ’60s, the highest of high art and the new, very popular medium of television were in constant contact.
The stage set for this appearance by the Beatles, on Feb. 9, 1964 on The Ed Sullivan Show, is clearly influenced by the bold imagery of Pop art. Amazingly, though, that movement in painting was barely even two years old when television set designers brought it to the consciousness of almost 74 million people watching Ed Sullivan that night.
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