Walking through the Ken Price retrospective at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, a line from Clement Greenberg’s 1955 essay “‘American-Type’ Painting” ran persistently through my head. Discussing Hans Hofmann, the painter perhaps most responsible for the critic’s analytic apparatus, Greenberg writes: “The difficult in art usually announces itself with less sprightliness” (Clement Greenberg, “‘American-Type’ Painting,” in The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 3: Affirmations and Refusals, 1950–1956, ed., John O’Brian, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993, 223). “Sprightly” certainly describes the ceramic sculptures that crowd the Nasher’s upper and lower galleries. Smallish (except for two late bronzes), with bright, fussy surfaces and bizarre, otherworldly shapes, the sculptures, which span from the late 1950s to 2011, are a sustained investigation of the minor, the decorative, and the playful. They are both intimate and irreverent, but are they difficult?

It was just such a question that Greenberg was responding to in his description of Hofmann’s vivaciously colored and lusciously surfaced canvases, sized to be hung, as T. J. Clark has argued, above the couches of the haute bourgeois. If any difficulty is attributed to Hofmann’s paintings, Greenberg admits, it is most often at the level of taste. “A good Hofmann,” Clark writes, “is tasteless to the core” (T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999, 397). Both Greenberg and Clark readily admit that it is in that questionable taste that Hofmann’s difficulty should be seen to reside. Not because one finds it difficult to enjoy the vulgar and distasteful, but because the paintings raise difficult questions having to do with expectations concerning what form seriousness and criticality should take in the visual arts. Hofmann, Greenberg concluded, passes through kitsch and comes out clean, demonstrating in the process just where the boundaries of the serious lie; even though the message is delivered in a sprightly manner, a serious claim about the nature of painting as a historical form is being made.

As I thought about Greenberg’s dilemma over Hofmann, I could not help wondering whether Price’s lyrical objects might gesture toward something similarly serious or if they were instead meant to simply delight the viewer through their formal play. The presence of this long-overdue retrospective, curated by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s (LACMA) Stephanie Barron, at the diminutive Nasher punctuated this question for me. The Dallas installation, which greets you upon first entering with later works, such as the cartoonish Whitey from 2003, certainly provides the requisite platform for seriousness: a spare, neo-Modern museum, designed by Renzo Piano. But the Nasher’s modest footprint (consisting of just four interior galleries on two levels) also accentuates the smallness, even the “minor” status, of Price’s sculptures. Additionally, the majority of Price’s works crowds just two of the Nasher’s indoor galleries, as though challenging the viewer to identify these small, decorative objects as sculpture at all. Standing in one of these galleries, overpopulated with Price’s precious objects, it seemed apparent to me that if any difficulty resided in these works, it was to be located precisely here, in their refusal to relinquish the minor status that continues to cling to the ceramic medium.

While Peter Voulkos, with whom Price studied, attempted to provide proof of the seriousness of ceramics by incorporating the mythos of expressionism into his large, action-packed pots, Price focused instead on expectations that ceramics remain a secondary art. Price’s seriousness, this is to say, can be seen to come about not by making ceramics into a “serious” or “major” art, but by seriously considering the institutional tendency to categorize them as minor. The concentration of Price’s sculptures in crowded groupings in just a couple of the Nasher’s smallish rooms quite consciously aims to bring this home. It comes as no surprise, then, to discover that Price himself, with the help of his good friend Frank Gehry, designed the exhibition’s spaces (for all three of its iterations at LACMA, the Nasher, and the Met), including multiple display cases built specifically for the retrospective. The careful attention paid to these vitrines signals that Price was interested not only in the decorative, but also in its institutional display. If Hofmann’s paintings appeared destined to be coordinated with the couches of the upper-middle class, Price’s objects seem destined for their mantels and display cabinets—a destination that Price acknowledged with some regularity by incorporating homey displays and decorative pedestals into his designs. Many of his works, such as those that compose the Specimen series (1963) and Happy’s Curios (1972–77), are as much about the carefully constructed displays as they are about the ceramic objects that find a home there. The displays in the Specimen series, for example, tend to be much larger and more carefully constructed than the sculptural objects themselves, demanding as much, if not more, of the viewer’s attention. That the retrospective extends this interest in display to include the layout of the entire exhibition makes clear that the framing of ceramics within the institution was a central concern defining Price’s practice.

Even more than the displays that he constructed for his objects, the garish surfaces of his sculptures, which invite an intimacy on the part of the viewer, seem particularly attuned to twentieth-century debates concerning the serious in art, particularly during its second-half. If the anthologies, textbooks, and exhibitions that have archived the moment are any indication, the epicenter of these debates was New York City, where Minimalism, Conceptual art, Postminimalism, appropriation art (the list goes on) vied to be understood as the proper framework for seriousness in the wake of modernism. Of course art was also being made on the West Coast, but the tone did not feel as earnest, the stakes not as high, the discourse not as heated. Rather, West Coast artists appeared all too close to the popular culture that “critical postmodernism,” as Hal Foster termed it, was tasked with countering. “The Cool School,” “Finish Fetish,” these were the celebratory phrases that described the group of West Coast artists with whom Price was associated, which included surfers (like Price himself), hot-rodders, and movie stars.

While East Coast artists, such as Robert Morris and Donald Judd, were embarking on projects that would spark one of the most definitive debates of the twentieth-century—High Modernism versus Minimalism—Price was producing small, frivolous-seeming objects, such as those that constitute his celebrated egg series (1961–68), planetary-looking ovoids that spit worm-like objects from their orifices, and kitschy vessels, such as Wart Cup (1966). Around the time Michael Fried published “Art and Objecthood” in Artforum (5, no. 10 [June 1967]: 12–23)—a rejoinder to Morris’s and Judd’s Minimalist salvos—Price was completing a series of “snail cups,” so named because they are cups with snails on them. When comparing Price to the East Coast avant-garde, his works can seem intentionally designed to violate the critical tenets being advanced there. Where Tony Smith and Morris pushed the scale of the object into the public domain, Price was cultivating the minute. Where Frank Stella and Judd were spurning internal relationships, Price was busy developing techniques to enhance the decorative effects of his surfaces, eventually abandoning traditional ceramic glazes for carefully applied and treated layers of highly chromatic acrylic paint. In 1966 Morris claimed that the "the better new work takes relationships out of the work and makes them a function of space, light, and the viewer’s field of vision” (Robert Morris, Continuous Project Altered Daily: The Writings of Robert Morris, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994, 15). Price’s objects do just the opposite; they draw you in and invite you to forget the institutional settings they inhabit.

In taking these works seriously, as I believe they ask us to do, questions that were suppressed in the East Coast celebration of the large and analytic get raised. These questions have a lot to do with taste (e.g., the major vs. the minor), but also with less institutional concerns, such as how a surface is simultaneously an exterior and an interior; how our bodies are vessels that contain, as well as sieves that secrete; how three-dimensional objects relate not only to the vertical space of our upright bodies, but also to the horizontal planes on which they rest. These are questions embedded in the ceramic medium itself, an art form whose specificity resides in the manner in which it relates to the most intimate habits of the human body. That Price manages to maintain these medium-specific queries, even while questioning the institutional neglect of this art as minor, signals his status as a major twentieth-century sculptor.