The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
2020–2021
October 19, 2020–May 9, 2021
On the occasion of the Museum’s 150th anniversary, Pictures, Revisited (2021) provocatively expands on The Met’s landmark 2009 exhibition The Pictures Generation, 1974–1984, which was the first major museum initiative to trace the art of appropriation through a complex network of practitioners, including Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, and Louise Lawler. These colleagues, collaborators, and sometimes classmates used appropriation to upend traditional notions of authorship and originality.
The current exhibition takes a deep dive into The Met’s rich collection of contemporary photography to explore photographic strategies of visual appropriation. The show’s twenty-nine works are comprised of images snipped from magazines, staged, or copied outright from other artworks. Drawing equally from pop culture and art history, the featured artists manipulate familiar photographs, ads, logos, and tropes, decontextualizing and reusing the imagery in their work. The works in Pictures, Revisited offer an antidote to the anxiety of influence—the fear that there is nothing new under the sun. In a world increasingly mediated by images, this exhibition suggests that there is no such thing as an original picture.
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