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Pop artists took a professional interest in products and packaging in the '60s: Commercial design offered not only new source material-Campbell's Soup labels or Brillo boxes-but the model for a whole new way of doing business. Across the decade, modern museums learned their design lessons as well as the artists did, perhaps even better. "Art has entered into the media system" wrote Harold Rosenberg in 1968, arguing that the "archetypal creation of the media is the package, whether it contains cornflakes, a 240-horsepower motor or a retrospective exhibition of the paintings of Jackson Pollock."1 Rosenberg's system is now business as usual, and the packages put together by curators and museum public-relations offices seldom raise eyebrows. It's to curator Paul Schimmel's credit, then, that his 1991 "Heiter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s" elicited the reaction that it did. A group exhibition of sixteen Southern California artists, "Helter Skelter" aimed to destroy the old stereotypes of LA art and artists and to challenge New York's hegemony; it was also, and not coincidentally, designed to stamp Schimmel's name on that revision: "Helter Skelter" was his first show as LA MOCA'S chief curator, a "go-for-broke debut," as the Los Angeles Times put it (Jan. 28, 1992), mounted less than two years after his high-profile hire. The exhibition introduced Raymond Pettibon and a younger generation of LA artists to museum audiences and highlighted new directions in the work of Paul McCarthy and Charles Ray. But it was the package (beginning with its name-"Heiter Skelter" was, of course, Charles Manson's blood-scrawled calling card) that made the show the "succès de scandale" (as Art News obligingly acknowledged [Apr. 1992.]) it was intended to be.
Almost every newspaper and magazine critic commented at the time on the deliberate provocation of the exhibition's title, and several also noted the scale and sensationalism of the museum's publicity campaign, as well as the crowd of eight thousand plus who showed up for the opening. "Teen delinquency and antisocial behavior take center stage," read a museum brochure, while in the catalogue, Schimmel spun the exhibition as though he were competing with Sally Jessy Raphael (a comparison offered by the LA Weekly). "The artists' use of debased signs and symbols, and their embrace of raw subjects from...