If you’ve been hearing that Pop Life is sprawling and shallow, you haven’t been misguided. It’s the nature of the show to be precisely that: part of the point is Pop Art isn’t neatly bound to the art-historical canon, and neither is it tied together by some tidy academic curatorial thesis. Just the opposite is true. Pop art is in the public sphere in a way most art isn’t, which is why it may seem that the exhibition showcases a dissonant checklist of the post-1980 Warhol legacy.

The superstars are there in full force, in all their glitzy glory: Warhol, Koons, Hirst, Murakami. As we walk through the show in sensory- overload mode, dutifully falling into our role as consumers of this rainbow-bright display of material culture, we can’t help but wonder for the popularity of this low-art turned high-art. As if in response to our thoughts, the curators exercise no restraint when it comes to X-rated art, from Jeff Koon’s suite of works with his then-wife pornstar La Cicciolina, to Andrea Fraser’s win/win reverse-commission film of hotel romp session with an unnamed collector who paid $20,000 to take part (the irony being that the artist is rarely in bed with the collector). Invariably, the pop artist is celebrity, and selling yourself is within limits.

Like these explicit works, re-creations of the historical intersection between pop art and the public itself drive home the point of a brightly branded consumerism, as we walk through Keith Haring’s Pop Shop and see memorabilia from Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas’s Bethnal Green store. Amidst the cacophony, people dance, talk, giggle, and sing (to I’m Turning Japanese, emanating from a Japanese kitsch room featuring a plasticized Kirsten Dunst in a bubblegum-blue bob). Is the only measure of artistic merit here public acclaim? If the same standards are applied to the exhibition, then it’s a success.

Until Jan 17

ELIZABETH BUHE