"By what calculus would a company choose to furnish their quarters with a poster of a guy modeling a windbreaker rather than a museum-quality painting by Lichtenstein?"

"Granted, companies need to promote their brands. But a generation ago, corporations turned to art to burnish their reputations and acquire a patina of class.... Branding seeks to deliver a product to the widest possible audience, while art is about one person alone in a room, trying to give physical form to the invisible matter of their inner lives — or in Lichtenstein’s case, wondering if he had an interior life in the first place. As he once said, 'I don’t have any big anxieties. I wish I did. I‘d be much more interesting.'"

From "Heading Upstairs With Roy Lichtenstein/'Bauhaus Stairway Mural: The Large Version,' created by the artist for a Beverly Hills building, was rejected by its new tenant...." (NYT).

The painting — which isn't really a mural, because it's on canvas and was easily removed — is  26 feet tall and 18 feet wide and "painted in situ over a period of five weeks" back in 1989 in a building designed by I.M. Pei.

The new tenant is Alo Yoga, "a company specializing in leggings, cropped tops and other clothing designed for what it calls 'mindful movement.'" Alo refused to talk to the NYT about its anti-art decision.

"When people think of Roy [Lichtenstein], they think of those cartoon images from the early ‘60s."

"But he had another close to 40 years after that working on other imagery," Said the late artist's second wife Dorothy, adding that Roy "was not a fan of comics and cartoons" which "seemed about as far away from the artistic image as you can get." It's because of the disconnect from art that he found it appealing to "transform" comics "into a formal painting."

You appropriate the stuff, and you disparage it. Is that right? It's an old debate about Lichtenstein, but there's a big new show at a museum, so you might want to talk about it.

What was the later work like? One thing he did was take an officially high art work like Van Gogh's bedroom at Arles and redo it:





He liked cranking something through his art-machine. Van Gogh/comics/whatever. Why trash the comics artists? It just seems peevish. Discourteous. Now, Roy's dead and the widow is speaking for him. Something icky about all that.