What We Are Seeing at the Whitney Is the Mainstreaming of Dadaism
Flatbed digital serigraph on wood, 20×24 in.

Jeff Koons: A Retrospective opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, June 27–October 19, 2014, then moved to the Centre Pompidou, Paris, November 26, 2014–April 27, 2015; and will subsequently travel to the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, June 5–September 27, 2015. Jed Perl wrote in his New York Review of Books article that, “Anybody who has taken Modern Art 101 will be able to give you some general idea of how we arrived at the point where a ten-foot-high polychromed aluminum reproduction of a multicolored pile of Play-Doh holds center stage at the Whitney—and is hailed by Roberta Smith, one of the chief art critics at The New York Times, as “a new, almost certain masterpiece.” What we are seeing at the Whitney is the mainstreaming of Dadaism and in particular of the readymade, the ordinary and frequently mass-produced objects that Marcel Duchamp reimagined as art objects, including, early on, a bicycle wheel, a bottle rack, and a urinal.”
The photograph used in the above work was circulated for promotional purposes on the Whitney’s own public website. The selected font matches that used by the publication where the quote first appeared.