A major retrospective of Pop Art icon Roy Lichtenstein opens at the Whitney Museum of American Art on October 11 with an unexpected name on the curatorial credit line: Venezuelan-American artist Alex Da Corte. Best known for his playful video art and installations that probe celebrity and consumer culture, Da Corte co-organized the survey with Whitney curator Meg Onli, bringing an artist's eye to one of the most familiar bodies of work in twentieth-century American art. On October 29, Da Corte will extend that engagement in person when he presents this year's Walter Annenberg Lecture at the museum, discussing his work with Lichtenstein both as an artist and as a curator. The lecture format gives him a platform to explain how a practitioner of a very different generation approached a figure whose imagery — Ben-Day dots, comic-strip heroines, brushstroke abstractions — has become so ubiquitous that it risks being taken for granted. In an interview for the New York Times, Da Corte told critic and Hyperallergic contributor Aruna D'Souza that despite the ubiquity of Lichtenstein's work, he "had never thought about it in a close way." He added: "So, for me, it felt urgent to ask, as an artist, how would I want my work to be considered and reconsidered when everyone thinks they know everything about it?" The retrospective is among the most anticipated museum exhibitions of the fall season in New York. By handing part of the curatorial reins to a working artist, the Whitney is betting that a fresh, practitioner's perspective can reopen questions about an artist whose reputation has long seemed settled — and the October 29 lecture will show how that experiment played out in the galleries.