We’re so appetized by Guy Trebay’s sketch of the Sam Green story that we’re totally bummed to read that the inadequately forthcoming book by Joan Tippett is still in the “research” phase. 

“Sam is one of the emblematic figures of the 1960s, in the sense that a 25-year-old man at that moment could become director of the I.C.A. and could do shows that retrospectively we can recognize as seismic,” said Jonathan Katz, a historian and a curator of last year’s “Hide/Seek” exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. To Mr. Katz, Mr. Green was a purely Pop creation, a kind of cartoon person whose thought-bubble changed at whim.

“Sam’s greatest strength was sociality,” said Mr. Katz, explaining that “Sam Green could be so much to so many, handsome and charming, gay and straight, serious and frivolous, anything you wanted him to be, he helped engineer the transition from an art world that still turned on the social in the early 1960s to a social world that turned on art. And we still inhabit that world.”

Along the way, though, something happened. Disillusioned by art and academia and ensorcelled by another world, a borderless one whose citizens’ wealth is a passe-partout to unlimited privilege, “Sam sort of lost the thread,” said Jane Tippett, an art historian who is researching a book on Mr. Green.

Perhaps Pop Art was popular when it was for a reason.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Thursday, April 7th, 2011 at 8:00 pm.