Pop Life @ Tate Modern

The Tate Modern, London, one of the most important modern art galleries in the world, presents 'Pop Life', an exhibition which configures as a journey through the 80s and the 90s across the themes of mass media and celebrities. The scenario of the so-called 'Material World' is described taking as categories the postmodern 'signposts' of Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons up to Damien Hirst, something that forces us to discuss once again on 'art' and its relationship with the market, with advertising and what we can name 'celebrity-obsession', the new divinities of the mass-mediatic circus.

In a nutshell, we are confronted with the XX Century individual and his perception of reality, on a line which connects art, advertising, pornography, materiality and - why not - psychology of and for the masses, a 'material world' whose apex has been the 80s - and it's not by any chance that Madonna is quoted. Music, in fact, together with television, can be considered the epistemological pivot of the period. An exhibition which, we might argue for the very first time in such a coherent contextualization, casts an eye on an age supposedly finished - and this seems to be finally true - whose heritage, indeed, is the present post-materialist scenario, son of the modern / postmodern dicotomy which characterized the last century. To the extent that, those who despise the present day of the human condition, socially speaking, should instead look at the past here presented to understand how, culturally, we have now become what we are. (Pop Life @ Tate Modern: ends January 17, 2010).

Alessandro Gandini