artNOW: Philadelphia exhibition rocks the Eastern Shore of Maryland

Talbot Spy thinks “Leslie Friedman’s neo-Pop Art installation is purposefully crass and annoying.”

In a review which compares the survey of contemporary Philadelphia art with the feature film “The Monuments Men,” critic Mary McCoy write this of Leslie Friedman’s pieces:

As if Andy Warhol was still alive and well, its row of silkscreened green nudes line up across from a pile of oversized multi-colored Coke cans and sugar substitute wrappers where an endlessly repeating video loop shows a masturbating woman.

Like the other artists in this show, Friedman is less concerned with the aesthetics of art than with the ways we communicate and build our belief systems. Her in-your-face look at consumer culture’s passion for overstimulation and vacuous pleasure is fairly predictable, but it offers a cursory nod to the fact that in a world of titillating underwear ads, graphic news videos and online pornography, art long ago lost its power to shock.

To see the review in full, click here.