Op Art’s mass success hinged on its low price and perceived craft

Evidence

By the time Empire premiered, The Responsive Eye was the most successful show in MoMA’s history. Having only just grudgingly accepted Pop Art, New York Times critic John Canaday leapt to endorse the next big thing, inevitably dubbed Op Art. … Canaday heralded The Responsive Eye with a feature article in the New York Times Magazine that remarkably went out of its way to stress Op’s affordability: “The average price of an optical painting being under $1,000, young couples are buying more optical art than any other form of abstraction.” Canaday followed up with a review that began by calling the show one “worth the risk of being crushed and maimed to see, a risk that will certainly be involved.” Was he speaking metaphorically? The Responsive Eye drew crowds as well as the animus of mandarin critics and radical artists—not least because in a third piece hailing this “brilliant show,” the critic credited it with “all the theatricalism typical of avant-garde art in the past but with a most welcome difference”—craftsmanship. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 693

Categorization

• XREF: The affordability angle is a direct instance of the avant-garde becoming a market — Hoberman’s core argument this chapter builds toward.
• SEED: Op Art as the first art movement commercially packaged for the middle class — a clean case study of how ‘new’ art gets domesticated by price points.