Solving Problems Through Art – Peter Schjeldahl On Agnes Gund’s Sale Of A Lichtenstein To Fund Social Justice

Roy Lichtenstein died in 1997. What might he think of all this, if he were alive today? He was a Democrat; he created prints in support of Dukakis, in 1988, and of Clinton-Gore, in 1992. But his overriding drive was to bring qualities of high art into taut accord with motifs from commercial mass culture. There is a term for that kind of aspiration: American.