Pictures Revisited

Oct. 19, 2020 - May 9, 2021

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY

A deep dive into The Met's rich collection of contemporary photography, Pictures, Revisited reassesses the legacy of visual appropriation at the Museum and beyond. The images in this show are snipped from magazines, staged, or copied outright from other artworks. Like the works in this exhibition, the show itself is a sort of remix; on the occasion of the Museum's 150th anniversary, it provocatively expands and reimagines The Met's landmark 2009 exhibition, The Pictures Generation, 1974–1984—the first major museum initiative to trace the evolution of visual appropriation through a network of practitioners including Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, and Sarah Charlesworth. Drawing equally from pop culture and art history, the artists manipulated familiar photographs, ads, logos, and tropes, decontextualizing and reusing this imagery to upend traditional notions of authorship. Responding to a media landscape ever more saturated with images, they reached a conclusion which in our digital age seems obvious: where pictures once documented reality, they now replace it.