Word: comically
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...springs from tragedy. It is then that the skillful black humor of Durang's script emerges. Chick for one handles this humor deftly--the scene in which Father Donnally denounces the church is delightfully ironic in the context of the devout family he addresses. McDonald also has a fine comic touch; she is wonderfully coy as Margaret, the subtly disparaging mother...
...Graffiti, ads and comic strips come to MOMA...
There have been two lines of attack. The first: by putting "low" culture -- graffiti, mass print, caricature, comic strips and so forth -- in the museum along with "high," MOMA, under the new curatorial leadership of Kirk Varnedoe, has abandoned its sacred mission of cultural discrimination. The second, and more hip, version: MOMA is too hidebound and elitist an institution to deal with popular culture, or with the recent "high" culture of the '80s, at all. As the clippings pile up, one may expect to see many variations on these themes. One, common to both, is that the show...
...quarters of a century, from Cubism to the '80s. They set out to show how some "high" artists raided "low" (popular and mass) culture for their own purposes. Not all of them, needless to say, did. You won't find the visual argot of advertising, news photography, graffiti or comic strips in the work of the great Apollonians of the past hundred years, from Monet and Matisse to Richard Diebenkorn. But this vernacular, Gopnik and Varnedoe rightly argue, is essential to a grasp of Cubism, Dada, Russian Constructivism, Surrealism and their European offshoots, along with a great deal of American...
...idea that "low" sources somehow debase the integrity of "high" art is moonshine, of course. It always has been: Goya's Caprichos, for instance, draw heavily on folk proverbs, crude popular drama and 18th century (mainly English) caricature. Miro was inspired by comic strips and folk scatology. And Philip Guston in the 1970s was able to attain his measure of greatness as a tragic painter only through a free, uncondescending use of motifs from George Herriman's great strip Krazy Kat and the underground comics of Robert Crumb. Nor can MOMA be accused of pandering to mass taste by exhibiting...