When Robert Mapplethorpe Took New York
Bob Colacello, Vanity Fair
March 2016
A few days apart in mid-March, the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) will open their joint retrospective, “Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Medium.” This unprecedented double exhibition, which will run until the end of July at both institutions, is all the more remarkable given the controversial—not to say scandalous—radical sadomasochistic content of much of Mapplethorpe’s best-known work. One could see it as a sign not only of how far the idea of photography as a fine art form has come over the past four decades but also of how far the boundaries of American culture and taste have been pushed and expanded during that same period. […]