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Pop! Goes the Adler 🍌
All the fun, none of the subversion.
Installation view courtesy of MAD
Daisy Alioto on The Mad MAD World of Jonathan Adler at the Museum of Arts and Design.
In 1963, poet, artist, collagist and writer Joe Brainard wrote to his friend Pat Mitchell, “In my work I’m trying to avoid being clever, being surreal, and being absurd. I want most of all to touch a place of being quietly disturbing, that grows and grows in no direction.”
It’s a seemingly incongruous artist statement for someone whose lewd drawings of Nancy are held by The Met, but an earnest one nonetheless. It remains hard to quietly disturb (or queer) something as straightforwardly weird as Americana. In an era stuffed with Benson Boone’s, one might ask—why try at all?
It remains hard to quietly disturb something as straightforwardly weird as Americana.
I thought about Brainard as I walked around The Mad MAD World of Jonathan Adler (through April 19th, 2026) at the Museum of Arts and Design. Adler was born in New Jersey in 1966. The potter-turned-interior designer—whose big break was selling at Barneys New York—has published four books on how to make your life happier and chicer.
The Mad MAD World of Jonathan Adler, curated by Adler, pairs his work with works from MAD’s collection, organizing them into eight “thematic vignettes.” These vignettes were styled by Adler’s husband Simon Doonan whose window dressings for Barneys New York stopped traffic for years and who has written even more books on how to be happy and chic.
So for that reason it’s unsurprising—even intentional—that the overall effect of the exhibit is of eight department store windows, including Americalia, an ode to “patriotic pastiche.” Is the true legacy of Pop Art to make exhibits that feel like shopping? I had to wonder, as I lapped the room.
It’s unsurprising—even intentional—that the overall effect of the exhibit is of eight department store windows.
Andy Warhol, who bears much of the blame for this, also gave us Candy Darling. Notwithstanding his embrace of mechanical reproduction, his work was not licensed (thus mass produced) in his lifetime. Similarly, though much of The Mad MAD World of Jonathan Adler feels ABC (already been chewed) by popular culture, his vignette Kottler-ia gripped me.
