MOCA’s “Ordinary People” manages to tell a story about photorealism that is eclectic, diverse, condescending and drab.
Homage to the People of the Bronx: Double Dutch at Kelly Street – La Freeda, Jevette, Towana, Staice (1981–1982) by John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres’ might be a thesis statement for the entire show: the pair take plaster life-casts of real children—theoretically the most realistic and specific technique possible—and render them as flat, kitschy, generalized and ignorable as a get-your-kid-vaccinated PSA due to the limits of the technology (the supposedly jump-roping kids’ stiff poses are clearly the result of them being cast while squished against a wall or floor) and the pair’s hamfisted painting technique (giving the figures goggle-eyes and textureless clothing). It might be mistaken for a comment on something if the intent weren’t so obviously wholesome and celebratory. The presentation doesn’t help: once upon a time Ahearn and Torres’ sculptures of their neighbors—mounted outside on buildings in the Bronx—were capable of delighting and sometimes scaring residents, but isolated in a museum, they might as well be invisible.
“Ordinary People” does everything possible to make attempts at realism—once the primary playground for art’s most competitive geniuses—seem prosaic and uninspired.
In the words of MOCA’s own introductory wall text:
Ordinary People contends that the popular appeal of photorealism is not based in dazzling, virtuosic technique, but rather in its work ethic. It reframes photorealism as a teachable, learnable skill, akin to sign painting, commercial illustration, billboard painting, and tattoo artistry. Citing photorealism’s emphasis on labor, the exhibition proposes that photorealism is widely appreciated because it demystifies the creative process and celebrates hard work.
It is good that no one reads these things, since rarely has a paragraph of would-be-inclusive institutional boilerplate managed to insult so many different kinds of people so quickly. It reads as if it was written by someone who has never met an illustrator, gotten a tattoo, or seen a fascinated neighborhood crowd around a muralist’s ladder—and the entire exhibition appears to have been curated while wearing the same blinders. The museum has assembled a show defining Photorealism as humble depictions of humble subjects simply by leaving out the dazzling depictions and dazzling subjects.
Installation view of “Ordinary People: Photorealism and the Work of Art since 1968,” 2025 at MOCA Grand Avenue. Photo: Jeff McLane. Courtesy of The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA).
There is something deeply conservative and almost literally, historically Puritan in MOCA exiling both uncommon talents and uncommon imagery to the same decadent Hell, feeding directly into a false and MAGAlike duality which defines the diverse and socially-aware coalition that likes art and didn’t vote for Donald Trump as standing in noble, ascetic opposition to all the fun America could be having without them. The show makes an appeal to a mythical populace that insists on looking at a version of itself shorn of specificity, intrigue, humor, sensuality or any of the other qualities that characterize successful popular entertainment. This reductive theory of Photorealism’s value also requires severing its obvious links to artists well within the critical mainstream’s elite canon, with blue-chip heavy-hitters like James Rosenquist, Gerhard Richter and the team of Fischli and Weiss nowhere to be found.
While from the beginning there have undeniably been advocates of Photorealism who escaped the critical stigma of being mere traditionalists by emphasizing their use of mechanical tools like tracing, grids and projectors, that was never the part of the movement that impressed the greater public. If the common folk loved to look at work for its own sake they’d be lining up around the block to see the dry iterations of Agnes Martin or On Kawara.
While Andrea Bowers’ exquisite colored-pencil drawing People Before Profits (2012)—depicting a protester holding a sign saying just that—is as deliciously skilled as its activist subject is relevant, in the larger context of the show one can’t help thinking the curators were ok with including this masterpiece of color, detail, and observation merely because it was very small. A viewer familiar with the history of Photorealism will wonder if Franz Gertsch’s similarly stylish and precise paintings of the gender-bending Luciano Castelli were left out because they were too big, too masterful, too flamboyant or too much all three? Likewise, crowdpleaser Chuck Close only appears here via one of his least-painterly greyscale experiments, complete with the gridded photo from which it was derived.
Installation view of “Ordinary People: Photorealism and the Work of Art since 1968,” 2025 at MOCA Grand Avenue. Photo: Jeff McLane. Courtesy of The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA).
If the current risk-averse mood demanded fellow genre-defining show-offs like Hilo Chen and John Kacere be left out because they were men depicting sexy women, that still doesn’t explain the exclusion of the deliriously vibrant pinball table, tin toy, and candy machine paintings of Charles Bell? Does the MOCA believe “ordinary people” have no taste for bubblegum pop?
Women are permitted to depict sexuality here, but not in any ecstatic way: Marilyn Minter—an artist undeniably fascinated by the sexualizing glamor of fantastic ad imagery—is represented by some of her most staid and minimal canvases. The utterly essential Joan Semmel—who pioneered an unmistakably female take on intimacy in the 1970s—is only here as a typical painter of anonymous nudes, with all her existential and psychedelic edges sanded off.
On the other end of the ledger, if the MOCA is truly attempting to posit photorealism as a salt-of-the-earth universal art form then it missed a trick by not using its curatorial heft to spotlight and elevate any of the gifted and unrecognized photoreal artists who make their living by way of “sign painting, commercial illustration, billboard painting, and tattoo artistry” and spend their uncompensated free time working on pictures of their dead relatives and Kobe Bryant. While the curators claim the know-how on display is “teachable” and “learnable” it is apparently only representable by artists who arrive with a commercial gallery’s seal of approval. One cannot credibly tell a story about the relationship of fine art to ordinary people while still policing the high-art/low-art boundary.
“Ordinary People”’s wishful thesis is so shaky that its internal contradictions reveal themselves as early as the second room, which Louis Philippe Joseph, Duke of Orleans (2006) lavishly dominates. While it is true that few painters or critics familiar with illusionistic painting technique see anything special about Kehinde Wiley’s touch, the many more casual viewers drawn in by the confrontational Afro-opulence of Kehinde Wiley’s paintings are generally disgusted or at least wrong-footed when they discover how much of each one was painted by assistants. The “work” on display in a Wiley is that of a supervisor—as any curator of contemporary art surely knows.
What does it mean for a curator to assemble a show claiming the public enjoys a piece based on qualities that curator can be sure it does not have? MOCA seems to be attempting to redefine the movement with neither the high-snob connoisseurship necessary to tell one painter’s technique from the next nor enough of the common touch to have ever spoken to regular museumgoers about paintings they like.
Over-curated shows are at their best when they fail and Photorealist genius does manage to occasionally surface here despite its existence being denied. The aggressive dryness of Duane Hanson’s three-dimensional Drug Addict (1974) makes a good argument for its lack of ostentation—you feel genuinely like you’re invading a man’s privacy. Marilyn Levine’s trompe-l’oeil ceramic sculptures of old leather goods are almost too skilled—while a private collector might feel free to flick one and hear the satisfying earthenware echo, a museum viewer who reads the label begins to wonder why they’re left staring, fascinated, through a plexiglass box at what for-all-the-world is just a thrift store handbag. The eye/intellect mismatch in the incoming information is a genuinely provocative moment in a show that could use a few more.
