Yet this exhibition is less about social history than using glam to present a new view of Sixties and Seventies art. At first the inclusion of seminal works by Richard Hamilton feels tenuous. As Bryan Ferry's tutor at Newcastle University, his fragmentary images of consumerism were a major influence on Roxy Music's eclectic, quasi-conceptual approach. Yet Hamilton works such as $he and Swingeing London – both from the Sixties – feel too large in scope to function as pieces in the show's slightly vague schema.
Hockney's Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy, on the other hand, featuring fashion designers Ossie Clark and Celia Birtwell, seems oddly appropriate. By 1970, as the public was losing faith in post-war utopianism, Hockney had turned his back on Pop Art and was looking to 18th-century portraiture, but with a celeb-conscious contemporary twist.
Homosexuality had only just been legalised in Britain – in 1967 – and on this side of the Atlantic at least a lot of glam was about the exploration of gay cultural attitudes (Bowie's idea of pop as a pose), for example by heterosexual artists and musicians. But by the mid-point of this exhibition as the focus shifts from London to New York, we've moved from a world of suburban emancipation, and relative innocence, to the exclusive coteries of Manhattan's long-established gay underground.
Warhol is the key figure here, as he was for the whole phenomenon. His "famous for 15 minutes" tag was glam's unspoken motto. Looking at his "screen tests" of the Velvet Underground – long takes of the band members' faces – you can see the inspiration for the vogue for teenage photo-booth self-portraits, even if most of those making them were only vaguely aware who Warhol was.
Yet much of the work in this part of the exhibition is wearisomely self-regarding. Jack Smith's photographs of exotically made-up cavorting figures from 1958-62 were undoubtedly ahead of their time, but they have the overcooked theatricality of a student performance. The drug addicts and drag queens in Nan Goldin's pictures are only too happy to flaunt their degradation, while Katharina Sieverding's Transformer, in which projections of made-up faces slowly change, makes street androgyny rarefied and academic.
This exhibition is like a hall of mirrors. The closer it gets to defining glam, the more the boundaries shift. It was, it seems, at once the last act of the Sixties, and the moment the Seventies found itself – a late manifestation of psychedelia and the prelude to punk. Proposing glam as simultaneously egalitarian and elitist, the show even finds room at the feast for Jimi Hendrix and King Crimson. It's proof that if you look hard enough you'll find evidence of just about any sensibility in just about every era.
Until May 12
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