Pop art re-examined at Tate Modern

Tate Modern's autumn blockbuster Pop Life is an eclectic exhibition that looks at multiples and MTV, screenprints and shops, collaboration and commercialism. Starting with Warhol's idea that 'good business is the best art' this exhibition brings together a diverse group of artists, from the original pop art of Warhol, through classic examples of Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas, to new work by Takashi Murakami.

Of course, money and art have always been bedfellows, even if it's a rocky relationship. And staging an exhibition that explores these themes at the depths of a recession is at once a provocation - and a chance for some pure escapism.

From Warhol's Studio 54 screenprints to Hirst's gold plate and diamonds, and Pruitt Early's paintings exhibited in a golden gallery to Cosey Fanni Tutti's soft porn pictures in a seedy x-rated corridor, there's a lot of glamour, fantasy, sex and showbiz here. And that's without a photo of a photo of a nude 10 year old Brooke Shields in a heavy gilt frame, shown in a dark red room in the installation Spiritual America by Richard Prince. Of course, Pop Art has always been interested in the kitsch and trashy, in soft porn and romantic schlock. A room of works by the master of kitsch Jeff Koons proves the point.

What's more interesting is the way that artists engage with commercialism on their own terms, and start exploring art's need to reach as wide an audience as possible.

Of course, Warhol's mass production was an obvious (indeed, the defining) example of this. Here are double portraits, multiple images, mass produced artwork, discounts for bulk-buying.

But another theme of the work here in this exhibition is very relevant - artists using empty shops and commercial spaces to take their work to a wider audience. Of course Warhol inhabited an empty industrial unit. But here is an archive of Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas' Bethnal Green 'Shop' and Keith Haring's New York 'Pop Shop'. In both cases, the artists produced multiples. While Haring produced slick, well-made editions (and Tate have reproduced many for sale here, in a recreated Pop Shop), Emin and Lucas produced scrappy, home-made T-shirts with roughly scrawled slogans on T-shirts, cardboard badges and handmade editions. There's an urgent, punky energy that is reflected in the work of many artists using empty shops right now. Perhaps 'Shop' is the starting point for today's empty shops movement, and this exhibition marks the first national gallery recognition of that movement.

It's fantastic to see an exhibition which takes a movement as a continuous process, rather than a short period in history with a defined start and end.

A major collection of work by Takashi Murakami brings the exhibition into the present. Most of the work in this installation is from the last two years, and it includes shoes alongside sculpture. Best of all, a music video with Kirsten Dunst as the star, singing along to 'Turning Japanese'. Witty, sexy, and - if it got a commercial release - a sure-fire chart-topping hit. Everything that Warhol would have wanted.

Pop Life is at Tate Modern from 1st October 2009 - 17th January 2010.

Footnote: since reviewing this exhibition, Tate Modern have - on advice from the Metropolitan Police - closed Richard Prince's installation, which features a copy of an image included in Playboy 30 years ago, of a naked ten year old Brooke Shields. It's in Pop Life, an exhibition which includes a statue of Jeff Koons shagging his porn star wife; a video in which a female artist pays someone $20,000 to have sex with her in a hotel room; and a collection of 70s soft porn images of Coum Transmissions artist Cossi Fanni Tutti. The exhibition is liberally splattered with warnings - 'Over 18s only', 'Work may be uncomfortable...'

At the press view, Richard Prince's installation wasn't the thing most people were looking at. However, I did stop and look. It's a thoughtful piece which leads the viewer to question why such an image would be produced, but also presents the image in a Romantic setting, like an old master painting: the photograph is so strange, and remember it's a second generation copy, so the image has a distinctly painterly quality. It's been widely reproduced, exhibited recently in America and the original Playboy is probably not that hard to find. The image - a quick Google search reveals - is included on many contemporary art sites.

Shocking? No, not really. A great bit of PR to start a cracking good exhibition off? Oh yes.