Regarding David Bowie’s Music-Videos at MoMA
One man’s total reinvention, live
By Saul Austerlitz
An archaeological dig through David Bowie’s astonishingly varied career as a musician and cultural provocateur eventually reveals three sharply distinguished phases: the 1970s Glam Androgyny Era, the 1980s Mainstream-Chasing Era, and the Return to Respectability begun in the ’90s and continued intermittently today. But within these periods lies an infinite substrata of poses and personae. Bowie has been so many different things to so many different people—worn so many masks, slipped into and out of such an astounding variety of guises—that the opportunity to see it all at once, in chronological order, feels oddly like peeking into the man’s diary.
Assisting cultural archaeologists of all stripes, Bowie donated his entire music-video collection to the Museum of Modern Art earlier this year….