“Pretty/Dirty,” the title of Marilyn Minter’s first retrospective opening today at the Brooklyn Museum, packs so much into two words. “It has multiple meanings, which I’m always interested in,” the artist explains, offering up an example: “One person’s beauty is another person’s disgust.” It’s a thread running throughout four decades of jarring, provocative work. In 1969, during a weekend home from college, she photographed her prescription-pill-addict mother at home in Fort Lauderdale, dyeing her eyebrows in bed and fastidiously applying makeup. Manicured hands pry apart a langoustine or a ripe orange in 100 Food Porn, a prescient 1989–1990 series soon followed by hard-core (and hot-button) subject matter. Minter riffed on cosmetics advertising with a suggestive lipstick bullet in 1994’s Rouge Baiser;a decade later, she exploded the norms of conventional makeup use in her close-cropped, hyper-sensorial Blue Poles and Glazed...