THIS IS FINE

Ed Ruscha's calmly collapsing America.

- JACKSON ARN

In a past life, he was an arsonist. A bold accusation, I realize, but nobody makes that many paintings, drawings, and photographs of fire without some buried lust for the real deal. By the time I left "Ed Ruscha/Now Then," an XXL retrospective at MOMA comprising some two hundred works produced between the Eisenhower years and the present, I had lost count of the burning things, which are as lowbrow as a diner and as ladi-da as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The title of Ruscha's 1964 photo series, "Various Small Fires and Milk," could have been, minus the milk, a reasonable title for the exhibition itself, if he hadn't painted various large ones, too.

The strangest thing about these fires, other than their quantity, is their calm. There are no people running out of LACMA, and if there were you get the feeling they'd be fine. Tranquillity, often simple but rarely simpleminded, may be Ruscha's essential quality as an artist. His work-preoccupied with mass media, the mother tongue of the twentieth century-is universal yet cozily regional, a trick he pulls off because the region in question is Los Angeles, where much of the world's mass media is born. Other postwar artists spoke a similar dialect, but Ruscha's best work has a coiled concision that makes Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg seem heavyhanded. "Large Trademark with Eight Spotlights" (1962), a half painting, half drawing of the Twentieth Century Fox logo, is as flashy as the film industry but as devil-may-care as a shrug; everything flows from (and back to) the half-assed pencil scrawls in the lower right corner. You're charmed by something you see straight through.