You might think the curator of an old-school museum show, and one who happens to be an artist himself, would flinch at the mention of the phone-out masses ’gramming away at his art show. Not Da Corte. The art of reproduction, the bones of appropriation, the creation of a feed—it’s all very Lichtenstein, and it activates the show.
At one point, Da Corte leapt up from the floor of his library to the stacks and plucked out a dust jacket for a book Castelli made when the legendary dealer showed Greene Street Mural—the physical manifestation of a work that was painted on his gallery wall, then painted over, never again to be installed on Greene Street.
The Whitney’s Greene Street Mural will also be temporary, but it will live on in the cloud. And Da Corte loves this—he held the dust jacket close to my eyes, flipped it vertical, and then started dragging it upward: et voila, Instagram.
Da Corte’s Hot Dog With Ketchup (2026)Courtesy of the artist/Matthew Marks Gallery, New York and Los Angeles/Sadie Coles HQ, London
“This is not dissimilar to a feed,” he says approvingly. “It’s a scroll.”
And for the curators, they know Lichtenstein would have approved.
“To bring Roy to the moment is to look at this wall, to look at this painting, to say, ‘Of course it’s urgent. This is exactly how we understand our lives now: through pictures, through images, through all of this,’” Da Corte says. “And it is a stream of images. It is a stream of graphics. It’s a tale as old as time. It’s heartless, and it’s sensuous. So it feels quite contemporary.”
