Pop Art originated in Warhol’s New York, but in the early ’60s it spread to Los Angeles, where a new generation (perhaps “clique” would be a better word) of artists embraced this new fad, characterized by the ironic glamorization of mainstream cultural detritus. (Think Warhol’s soup labels and Hockney’s swimming pools.) To be frank, most people wouldn’t think that taking a photograph of an empty parking lot and putting the photo on the wall of a gallery (as did Popster Ed Ruscha) really counts as “art,” or anything you might actually want to look at. But Whiting and the over-intellectualized world of art critics have so aggrandized the patently trivial and simplistic themes and techniques of Pop Art that, while reading Pop L.A., one begins to wonder — is it all a big joke? How else to make sense of Whiting’s almost comical hyperacademic analysis of images that speak for themselves? The chapter on “beefcake” photos — homoerotic pictures of well-built young men — has the pompous title, “The Erotics of the Built Environment.” This is what happens when an incisive mind like Whiting’s get too subsumed in academia and its obsessive concern with the significance of every bit of fluff that comes under its withering gaze. Sometimes a parking lot is just a parking lot. Pop L.A.‘s sole saving grace is its extensive series of vivid reproductions, tracing the LA modern art scene from the ’20s to the ’70s, in which you can see with your own eyes how artists really seemed to have talent up until the ’50s, when a Pop Art-inspired wave of self-indulgence and intentional sloppiness rendered the whole scene marginalized.
Grade: D+