"I don't mean this, but I'm going to say it anyway. I don't really think of pop art and serious art as being that far apart"

Tharp prefaces her statement with a paradox that feels both mischievous and precise. The admission of saying something she “doesn’t mean” signals an artist’s wariness about how language fixes ideas that should stay fluid. It also acknowledges the social risk of crossing entrenched hierarchies: once you claim that pop and “serious” art are neighbors, gatekeepers bristle. Yet she says it anyway, staging the friction between intention and expression that artists work with every day.

The real argument is less about genre than about rigor and impact. Pop and so-called serious art share craft, structure, and the will to move an audience. Hooks and motifs, repetition and variation, clarity and surprise, these are formal devices as present in a symphony as in a chart-topping song, as central to a museum piece as to a billboard. Pop art, historically, has been conceptually serious: Warhol’s soup cans and Lichtenstein’s comics interrogate value, authorship, and desire with a precision that rivals any high modernist canvas. Likewise, much “serious” art steals from the popular to refresh its language and reach.

Tharp’s own practice makes the case kinesthetically. She braided ballet discipline with vernacular dance, set classical lines to the Beach Boys in Deuce Coupe, filtered jazz and social dance through Baryshnikov’s virtuosity in Push Comes to Shove, and built Movin’ Out on Billy Joel’s catalog without sacrificing choreographic complexity. The result isn’t dilution but a broadened palate: technique sharpened by accessibility, accessibility deepened by technique.

What separates the categories is often institutional framing, who funds it, where it’s shown, how it’s reviewed, rather than intrinsic value. Seriousness names an attitude toward making and seeing, not a caste. The opening disclaimer remains important, though: any slogan compresses nuance. By voicing it, Tharp invites us to treat the boundary as a working hypothesis, not a law, and to notice how art thrives when it trespasses.