Strungout on Jargon (Slight Return)

TEMPLATE 6: The Disneyland/ Dystopian Paradise/Planned Utopia Artist Statement $21.99:

Step 1: talk about how your interest in planned communities came from interrogating the assumptions of the following:

• the American dream
• the failed narrative of progress
• conflicts that inhere in postmodern urbanism
• experimental geography

Step 2: talk about ambiguous futures, suspended temporality and the destabilization of the reality principle
Step 3: rail against a too-perfect repressed 'paradise' that is really a simulacra of XYZ
Step 4: bring in Buckminster Fuller, Brazilia and Celebration (planned community in Florida)

TEMPLATE 7: The Deconstructed Architecture/Unmonumental Sculpture Artist Statement

Step 1: talk about how your work began with a preoccupation with 'haunted spaces,' 'aporia' and 'liminality'
Step 2: talk about how your installations render visible what the built environment has naturalized or obscured
Step 3: tell an anecdote about how your 3 month artist residency in a Third World country (i.e. South/Central America, Eastern Europe, Africa, etc.) awakened an awareness about how ethnography is embedded in place in a way that the homogenized metropli of the First World never allowed you to perceive that allows you to simultaneously:
A.) off-handedly brag about how you were at a residency
B.) show that despite your impenetrable wall of accolades, you are still a sentient aware person capable of being effected and transformed by lived experience (they LOVE that!)

From "Top Ten Words I Am Sick of Seeing on Artists Statements" by Andrea Liu [ # ]

image: Thomas Struth

Ceci n'est pas une pipe, pt. 118

From a recent discussion between Susanne von Falkenhausen and David Joselit, concerning the latter's curatorial hand in the Painting 2.0: Expression in the Information Age exhibition, via the German edition of Frieze mag:

SvF: So medium specificity – that’s the old spectre. And what does medium specificity, what does Clement Greenberg, have to do with Guy Debord? You would like to get painting out of the register of Greenberg and put it into a register of Debord?

DJ: I suppose it’s very hard to characterize a complex project in a slogan. But from my point of view, what painting really can do is represent, even theorize, the circulation of pictures – and by ‘pictures’ I mean commoditized images as they arise in mass media of all types ranging, in our period, from television to the internet. We know that appropriation was aimed at indexing the ‘life of pictures’. But it did so in a very severe way, which in fact made the displacement from one context to another – art to advertising, for instance – clean and unambiguous. Whereas in painting, what you see from Robert Rauschenberg to the present is that commoditized images are put into circulation in time and space, and move at different rates. Many of the questions animating conceptual art with regard to changing values of visual knowledge have been explored in painting, but I don’t think this has been sufficiently recognized. While it is a simplification that has many problems, for the sake of argument I think your characterization is largely correct: we are trying to take painting from Greenberg to Debord.

SvF: But Debord...

DJ: He would have hated the project.

SvF: Yes, I think so. He would have sent in some black paper or something like that.

DJ: Right, or a film. ...Obviously Debord did not and would not approve of painting.

Unless the painting in question were one by Asger Jorn (who's included in the exhibition). In which case, Debord was all to ready to accept it as a gift, which -- lore has it it -- he would turn around and sell, using the money from the transaction to fund the publishing of the next edition of the SI journal.

Was It Ever So Simple?

Is an obsession with the past the sign of a morbid disposition? Obsession in the case meaning a constant rehashing of past occurrences and achievements – done for the sake of assuaging an anxious sense of stasis, degeneration, impasse, or reversion in the present. I find myself wondering this in recent months, as the news offers an incessant series of anniversaries – of this or that landmark legislation, historical milestone, technological innovation, tragic event or horrific massacre, etcetera etcetera etcetera. This, admittedly, might simply just another example of the news cycle doing what it does – filling news holes and broadcast time with whatever it can, especially if that whatever is easier to explain than (say) what's going on in Syria or Crimea.

At any rate...some time ago Simon mentioned the matter of retromantic tendencies within the artworld of the moment. I wasn't so convinced at first, but soon conceded that it was a trend, albeit a marginal and trifling one. In the interim, there have been several retro- exhibitions, curatorial events that have aimed – in some form or another – to restage or revisit some paradigm-shifting exhibition of years gone by. One can easily guess the likely candidates in advance. And yet another one is presently in the offing, that being the Jewish Museum's repackaging to their historic "Primary Structures" exhibition – the 1966 show being that one that offered audiences a survey of Minimalist art practices as embodied in the works of Tony Smith, Anthony Caro, Dan Flavin, Carl Andre, Anne Truitt, Ronald Bladen, Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Daniel Bell, and others. Minimalism had been around for at least 5-6 years by that point, so it wasn't entirely new; but the exhibition marked the first time that the "New Art" tendency gained the notice of the broader public and the media.

Not that this amounted to public acceptance at the time, merely recognition. Minimalist art would remain controversial for years thereafter. Over the intervening half century, its legacy remained has mixed. For instance: In terms of artistic practices and impulses, did Minimalism mark the end of something, or the beginning? Some would answer "yes" to the first, framing in terms as an extremist end-gaming extension of Greenbergian notions of puristic formalism, reductive literalism, and "medium specificity." Others might argue the latter point, asserting that Minimalism constituted a break from the Greenbergian model of modernist art, and was partly responsible for introducing prefabrication and permutational seriality into art-making practices that are still very much with us today.*

The current Jewish Museum reboot affair is titled "Other Primary Structures," is the first of a two-part exhibit, and touts itself as a "sequel" and a "response" to the 1966 original. As such, it aims for historical revisionism – expanding upon its predecessor's Anglo/North American bias by including the work of artists who were supposedly doing comparable things in other places (e.g. Brazil, Croatia) around the same time. As Roberta Smith states in her NYT review, "Other Primary Structures" suffers from a number of weaknesses, not the least of which is the nature of its laissez-faire premise. Personally, I think it's a bit of curatorial overreach to try and shoehorn works by the likes of Brazilian Neo-Concretist artists Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica into the mix, considering that the artists involved in each respective group were pursuing very different ideas.**  But it looks like we can expect more of this sort of porousness in the second part of the exhibition, which will feature work by then-contemporaneous artists from Latin American, Eastern Europe, Israel, and Africa.

One has to allow for a fair amount of contextual slippage for this premise to work. But it's well-intentioned, I suppose. At the very least, viewers are introduced to a number of previously unknown or neglected artists. Still, by choosing to lump it in under the title of the original exhibition (even with the tacked-on "Other" qualifier), one can't but the belated inductees are still subsumed subjuncts to the Established Narrative. But that's the nature of trying to stick with the favored categorizations of art in the 1960s. It's messy business. Art practices were fragmenting, having already split off in a number of directions within first year of the decade. As Minimalism was first coming into being, so was it's nemesis – the artistic sensibility that some labeled "postminimalism," as embodied in the works of Eve Hesse, Lee Bontecou, Paul Thek, et al. Even some of the chief Minimalists (e.g., Morris, Serra) would schizophrenically vascilate between the two tendencies a few years down the road, as Bataillian ideas of the visceral, the unstable, and the uncanny began to increasingly gain traction. (Which points in the direction of another recently-resurrected exhibit, bringing us back to "When Attitudes Become Form.")

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*  There are other ways of looking at it, as well. For example: Perhaps as a passing resurgence of a Constructivist sensibility, its onotology-of-objecthood possibly intended as a brutely materialist rebuttal to the romanticism and mysticism embodied by "color field" painters like Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Ad Reinhardt, et al.?

If anything, the movement helped introduce usher in the phenomenon of the artist and theorist and critic, be it in relation to his own work and that of his immediate peers; with artists like Robert Morris, Donald Judd, Sol LeWit, Dan Graham, and Robert Smithson stepping into the critical process and providing the central texts. Granted, at the time there were a handful of new critics – Barbara Rose, Lucy Lippard, Gregory Battock – who proved willing and able to analyze the work, and recognized its significance. But to read their early essays on Minimalist work if to find them floundering, grasping to nail down its key concepts, if not devise an aesthetic vocabulary for discussing the work in the first place. Judd & co. would eventually step in to intervene.

**  Grounds for debate, I'm sure. One could argue for some generalized theoretical overlap; but it's be a tenuous case, at best. Plus I doubt most of the first-gen Minimalists would ever have been so generous in extending the courtesy. They were a narrowly-focused bunch, and could often be arse-gratingly pedantic about the whole enterprise, as well.

The Half-life of Images

"Data, sounds, and images are now routinely transitioning beyond screens into a different state of matter. They surpass the boundaries of data channels and manifest materially. They incarnate as riots or products, as lens flares, high-rises, or pixelated tanks. Images become unplugged and unhinged and start crowding off-screen space. They invade cities, transforming spaces into sites, and reality into realty. They materialize as junkspace, military invasion, and botched plastic surgery. They spread through and beyond networks, they contract and expand, they stall and stumble, they vie, they vile, they wow and woo.

"Just look around you: artificial islands mimic genetically manipulated plants. Dental offices parade as car commercial film sets. Cheekbones are airbrushed just as whole cities pretend to be YouTube CAD tutorials. Artworks are e-mailed to pop up in bank lobbies designed on fighter jet software. Huge cloud storage drives rain down as skylines in desert locations. But by becoming real, most images are substantially altered. They get translated, twisted, bruised, and reconfigured. They change their outlook, entourage, and spin. A nail paint clip turns into an Instagram riot. An upload comes down as shitstorm. An animated GIF materializes as a pop-up airport transit gate. In some places, it seems as if entire NSA system architectures were built—but only after Google-translating them, creating car lofts where one-way mirror windows face inwards. By walking off-screen, images are twisted, dilapidated, incorporated, and reshuffled. They miss their targets, misunderstand their purpose, get shapes and colors wrong. They walk through, fall off, and fade back into screens."

From "Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead?", by Berlin-based filmmaker Hito Steyerl, appearing in the latest edition of the e-flux journal.

The e-flux journal has volleyed off a pair of thematically-linked editions in the past few months. In the first of the pair, "The Making of Americans", penned by the Slovene[?] conceptual artist known to sometimes lecture in the persona of a back-from-the-grave Walter Benjamin. In the essay, "Benjamin" addresses the shaping of the canon of Modern art during the post-war years; particularly hinging on the role played by MoMA director Alfred H. Barr:

"While walking through MoMA, a majority of the American museumgoers there probably had no idea that what they were seeing was not Europe’s present, but its past. Although all the artworks were from Europe, hardly anyone was aware that the story told through the arrangement of the museum’s exhibits was not European; it was not a European interpretation of modern art. Instead, it was a story told by an American—namely, Alfred Barr. This story did not merely preserve the memory of European modern art, but in fact reinvented it by categorizing artists according to 'international movements' instead of 'national schools.' After the catastrophe of WWII, MoMA began to be perceived in Europe as the most important museum of modern art in the world. By admiring this American museum with the most comprehensive collection of European modern art around, 'natives' of the Old World were unaware that they adopted its story as well—its story about their own art and culture. Gradually, this story became the dominant, canonical narrative on both sides of the Atlantic, determining future developments in Western art for decades to come."

Barr's famous schemtic "tree" makes an appearance, naturally; as does the dissent that arose in the New York art community concerning Barr's Europhilic affinities and the Museum's early tendency of ignoring indigenous artists. What intrigues me is the portions of the essay in which "Benjamin" makes an argument -- re, the divergent nationalist-versus-international perspectives that he attributes to Europe and the U.S., respectively -- that all-but constitutes a counterithesis to that of Serge Guilbaut's axe-grinding How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art. Of particular interest is the "view from abroad" section toward the end, in which he discusses government funding for art exhibition during the Cold War years, particularly in light of the "Advancing American Art" political fracas that I wrote about here earlier.

When We Were Real

Eh. Maybe I was wrong. Or only slightly off. Perhaps it is a subtrend, after all -- the matter of curatorial re-enactment. I say this after reading about an exhibition which recently wound down at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, a 50-year anniversary commemorative "Reproduction" of the 1963 art event Leben mit Pop – eine Demonstration für den kapitalistischen Realismus, as originally organized and staged by four young and as-yet-known artists: Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Konrad Lueg, and Manfred Kuttner.

But in some respects, the Kunsthalle affair wasn’t a literalist attempt at restaging the original event. For one, the reproduction was hosted by an actual museum, whereas the original was staged in a department store. Also, it doesn't strictly focus on the original event so much, but rather on those first few years that Polke, Richter & co. were associated with each other as they developed – each in his own way – the "Capitalist Realism" aesthetic that they'd chosen as their shared artistic banner. And while the artists themselves took active part in the staging of the 1963 event (a la a Fluxus-style “Happening”), I doubt anyone approached the surviving instigators about "getting the band back together," so the Kunsthalle instead mounted a number of large photographs from the occasion that graced the walls throughout. In fact, as a review in the art publication Spike has it, the curators decided to go all-in with the "reproduction" thematic trope:

"Most significantly, the works by Richter, Polke and Lueg – Polke’s Socks (1963), Richter’s Neuschwanstein Castle (1963), for example – were presented only as full-scale, photographic reproductions, mounted unassumingly on corrugated cardboard. This decision to include only reproduced works (excepting the real letters and photographs that were presented in the archival vitrines) somewhat collapsed the formal divisions between work and reception, and more significantly, demonstrated an attempt to strip these canonical paintings of aura."

As far as contemporary art is concerned, we’re still very much living under the influence of Pop; in much the same way that we’re still awash in the thrall of the material culture that inspired the movement’s first generation of artists. So much so, that Pop holds an almost monolithic presence in the cultural imagination. But between the Kunsthalle’s revisitation of Leben mit Pop and the Tate’s tribute to the 1958 This Is Tomorrow exhibition a few years ago, we’re presented with a somewhat ironic conundrum – as each of the original versions of these two exhibitions embodied two different, international responses to postwar material culture. The Independent Group’s This is Tomorrow exhibition was largely celebratory in tone. The Group’s engagement with the emergent culture of the day, via their activities at the London ICA and the resulting exhibition, were a largely noncritical – and at times enthusiastic – exploration of the transformative dynamics of “mass culture” (as well as a generational rebuke against the parochialisms of Herbert Read and his fellow directors at the Institute).*

But the four artists responsible for Leben mit Pop had a different relationship with postwar American popular culture; one which was much more ambivalent. Each wveas young enough to ha come of age in the years following World War II, in a mainland Europe shaped by the Marshall Plan – the U.S. recovery project that aimed to rebuild war-torn Europe and counter Soviet ideological influence by way of promoting its own model of postwar prosperity and democracy abroad. As Europe struggled to extract itself from the rubble and get their own industrial economies in full operation, these years saw a deluge of American products and media, all of it modeled after a middle-class lifestyle as broadcast and imported wholesale from another shore. A love/hate relationship ensued among some Europeans, one characterized by a circumspect regard toward a blinkered culture of consumerism that sometimes rubbed against the grain of traditional native values. Some would eventually begin to refer it as the “coca-colonization” of Europe.

Add to all this that Polke and Richter had both been defectors from regions of East Germany. Having been exposed to postwar European life on both sides of the Wall, the recognized that the true marketplace wasn’t so much about objects and mod cons, but ultimately one of ideas. With the shape of contemporary culture coalescing around the channels through which these ideas were communicated – through the airwaves, films, magazines, showrooms and Expo halls of late Modern society.


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*   Or, as IG co-founder Reyner Banham called it, "the marble shadow of Sir Herbert Read’s Abstract-Left-Freudian aesthetics." It might also be noted that the Group’s focus wasn’t limited to pop culture in the common sense, but extended to science and technology, as well. For this reason, the sometimes utopian optimism that characterized the IG’s discussions and activities have provoked occasional comparisons with the aesthetics of Italian Futurism earlier in the 20th century.

Canon Fodder: Some Random Sidenotes

Claire Bishop begins her essay “Digital Divide” (see prior post) with the springboard thesis that many recent artists shirked or fallen behind in embracing and utilizing current digital technology. Instead, she argues, there’s been a recent trend in the opposite direction – “an eschewal of the digital and the virtual” as manifest in a predilection for obsolete analogue technologies like 8- or 16-mm film, slide projectors, pre-digital photography processes, and the like. Her query on the topic is as much theoretical as prescriptive, and to some degree she answers her own rhetorical questions before even asks them. Perhaps no more so than when at one point she concludes, “The continued prevalence of analog film reels and projected slides in the mainstream art world seems to say less about revolutionary aesthetics than it does about commercial viability.”

Which acknowledges one pragmatic aspect when it comes to digital art (or a lack thereof). For the sake of display and presentation, one can always uncrate a painting or sculpture, or – by following a detailed set of instructions and schemata – reassemble an installation. Anything involving technology will inevitably pose the problem of obsolescence, if not the possibility of having to reverse-engineer a solution in order to get it to function properly. Perhaps preferable for everyone involved not to bring the item out of storage after several years only to encounter an error message: “PLATFORM NOT SUPPORTED.”

One could argue that the theme of obsolescence has been with us since the advent of pop art (if not earlier), if not an integral component of pop’s reflections of consumer culture. Bishop skirts around acknowledging as much when she cites the practice of artistic “repurposing” at play in the work of contemporary artists, particularly Rashid Johnson. Yet Johnson’s practice of gathering and displaying could be viewed as a variation on the same as done by Haim Steinbach, if not harkening back to pop and assemblage “combines” of Robert Rauschenberg and his neo-dadaist peers; at least to the degree that they all involve a similar repurposing and reclamation of mass-produced goods or cast-off detritus.

The theme of obsolescence is central to Pop because it’s also a core component (a feature, not a bug) to the economics of consumer culture. In that respect, one can detect an undercurrent of morbidity beneath the sheen of Pop’s alleged celebratory engagement of the common culture; that flash of recognition that comes from a work being so immediately tied to a given cultural moment. But one day's ephemera is the next day's rubbish or marginalia, and the pace of supplantation – one gadget or app or upgraded operating system replacing another – builds in momentum and rapidity as one approaches the current digital age.

Analog or digital, perhaps neither here nor there in this instance; one being – in a sense, theoretically – a metaphor or stand-in for the other. All of them bound for a garage sale or trash heap sooner or later.*

The artist Robert Smithson intuited much of this early on in his career, having initially been attracted to working in a Pop style in the early 1960s, but quickly abandoning it to take his work in other directions. For Smithson, obsolescence was but one of many things that fell under the larger domain of entropy, the latter being the central guiding concept to his "earthworks." Case in point, in his 1966 essay "Entropy and the New Monuments," Smithson quotes Vladimir Nabokov’s observation that, "The future is but the obsolete in reverse."**


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Another scenario; continuing on the themes of obsolescence, entropy, decay and shelf-life...

Doing a little more casting about, I find a couple of other critics citing incidents of “recurated” exhibitions – revivals or resurrections of notable exhibits from bygone eras – and each expressing wariness about it being a sign of some nascent trend. Which begs the question: Which exhibitions might merit such a thing.

First that leaps to my mind: The "Eccentric Abstraction" gallery exhibition, as curated by critic Lucy Lippard back in 1966, which featured the work of Alice Adams, Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, Bruce Nauman, Keith Sonnier, et al. The exhibition’s notable for a number of things, among them the role it played in introducing the broader public to the work of Eva Hesse; who has largely unknown at the time, and would eventually be canonized, years after her untimely death.

I raise this somewhat perversely, given the fate encountered by a number of Hesse’s works. Her piece for Lippard's exhibition, "Metronomic Irregularity II," posed its share of installational issues; having at one point before the opening fallen from the wall on account of being improperly mounted. As it was, a fair amount of assembly was required for the piece, and it was reported to have lain around in an "undone" state for a long while after the show.

Other of Hesse's works have been lost due to the materials the artist chose to work with – namely, the pieces crafted from latex rubber. It was a newly available material at the time, and Hesse (along with some of her peers) used it for some of its physical properties, finding it ideal for crafting surreally & uncannily corporeal abstract objects. Thing is, as a material it doesn’t age well – eventually decomposing, warping, decaying, withering. Which makes them candidates for the category of works of art that no longer exist in their original form, although there have been efforts to recreate some of them in recent years.

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*  Curiously, once thing that Bishop overlooks (or intentionally avoids in her citing repeated uses of obsolete tech like 8-mm film and slide projection is these devices' prior very-common role in pedagogical settings (as opposed to their entertainment or interpersonal "communicative" functions). This consideration, I suspect, plays no small part in why such gear has been adopted by particular artists in recent years.

**  The quote, incidentally, is taken from Nabokov’s “Lance,” which was written in 1952 and counts the final short story that the author ever published. The story takes the form of a science-fiction tale concerning interplanetary travel, which Nabokov frequently taking the opportunity – via the story’s narrator – to vent his own loathing of the science fiction genre.

Canon Fodder, Pt. I: Institutionalized

Truly groundbreaking work: Bern, 1969

Simon recently pointing in the direction of a couple of curious art-related items, via his Retromania blog...

The first being Holland Carter's recent NYT piece about the Fondazione Prada’s recent restaging of the watershed "When Attitude Becomes Form" exhibition, originally curated by Harald Szeemann in Bern, Switzerland in 1969. Cotter tries to situate this event in the context of what he asserts is an emerging trend in the artworld – that of a backward-looking "epidemic of re-enactment fever," pumping the allegation up to near-crisis proportions in the opening paragraphs:

"...Young painters are working in styles that were hot half a century ago. Yesteryear’s performance art is being re-performed. Exhibitions that have been done and done — on Matisse, Picasso, European abstraction — are being done again.

"Has the art industry, noted for its nanosecond memory, suddenly become history-conscious? Is the art market, like Hollywood, nervous about anything but proven brands? Is art just plain out of ideas?"

The re-performance claim we might be a dig at Marina Abramović's recent re-staging some of her "greatest hits," as well as other recent examples. The claim about young painters is baffling due to its vagueness and the arbitrariness of the timeline cited.¹

Exhibitions of Picasso, Matisse, et al – museums have always done this sort of thing, usually attempting to mount at least one mega-show by some big-name blue-chip master per annum. If these numbers are up lately, then there may be some sociological factors that account for it. For instance, the recent swing toward re-urbanization over the past decade and a half. With the populations of certain major cities growing (or at least demographically shifting), museum attendance numbers have correspondingly increased, as more people see paying a visit to their local cultural institutions as being part-and-parcel of cosmopolitan living. Many of these institutions have responded in turn by mounting exhibitions that will lure more residents and tourists through the turnstiles. This would account for art exhibitions where name recognition (Degas, Renoir, Da Vinci, etc., etc.) plays a large role, but also for the proliferation of other types of mass-appeal shows that we’ve seen in the U.S. over the same span of time – the art of Norman Rockwell, the art of Versace, the art of motorcycle design, the wardrobe of Jackie Onassis, the art of the Pez dispenser, etc..²

Has there been a recent profusion of exhibition re-stagings? If so, I’ve failed to pay close attention or connecting some scattered dots. The only one that leapt to mind was the Whitechapel’s (somewhat ironic) retrospective of the Independent Group’s 1956 "This Is Tomorrow" paradigm-shifting extravaganza a few years ago, as well as a partial recreation of the IG's "Parallel of Life and Art" at the Royal Academy of Art a few years before that.

I'm inclined to think that if this sort of thing signifies anything, it has more to do with the "cult of the curator" that emerged back in the early 1990s and has stayed with us ever since. And perhaps the curatorial class’s hailing or enshrining its own legacy by commemorating a few grand moments from the past – those occasions (infrequent as they were) when an ambitious, zeitgeist-defining exhibition actually succeeded in corralling a corpus of work which would not only define its moment, but point in the direction that art would (in one way of another) be taking in the years that followed. (Perhaps, then, this might considered the manifestation of an underlying anxiety among some curators -- about an inability to undertake any similarly decisive endeavor in the present-day global art field?) ³

So I'm not so sure about Cotter's diagnosis that this is all indicative of a pervasive condition or trend, as his argument seems to be threaded on an attempt to braid several diffuse dynamics into a master narrative. Perhaps these things could coalesce into a condition of stasis, nostalgia and ouroboric self-cannibalization (a theme which, it seems, Cotter has been rehearsing for some years now), but only time will tell.⁴

Secondly, there's Simon's other post, which cites two texts. One of these being Dieter Roelstraete's essay "The Way of the Shovel: On the Archeological Imaginary in Art," which appeared in an edition of e-flux some 4 years ago; the other being Claire Bishop's more recent "Digital Divide" essay from last September's issue of Artforum. Each/both of which navigate far more choppy waters, deal with more complicated considerations. Which will have to wait until a Part Two follow-up post.


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1.  Meaning what, exactly? That there’s been a flood of new-gen painters doing work that looks like Frank Stella? Or Jules Olitski? Mel Ramos? Richard Diebenkorn? Wayne Thiebaud? Larry Poons? Ed Ruscha? Alex Katz? Bridget Riley? David Hockney? Richard Lindner?...
2.  This sort of quasi-populist approach is what some critics not-too-long-ago referred to as "The Krens Effect." Add to all this that, during this same period in question, some of the top institution have gone global -- and you have to fill all spaces with something, y'know?
3.  Which is why we're unlikely to see a remounting of, say, of MoMA's 1965 "The Responsive Eye" show.
4.  Admittedly, Cotter includes a qualifier with his choice of the term "art industry," which at least acknowledges that economic factors are at play in some of this. But given the state of the current art world and its markets, such forces are pretty much a given.

IV

After a some years had passed and with the benefit of hindsight, it was unanimously agreed that it was an early and significant salvo in what would become a never-ending war against "twee."

III

Apparently they were part of some subgenre that briefly came and went, and their first and only album was an attempt to conform to some trend that had a lot to do with fetishizing (or perhaps only obsessively shopping for) shoes.

Post-breakup, the frontman would have a prolific career of befuddling and bedazzling the world with the eclecticism of his output.

Contractual Obligation Interlude, II

Unsurprising that the group would call it a day after this, their swansong single. As many critics have pointed out, the A side mostly sounded like a slight and somewhat tired retread of their debut, "Insert Text Here."

Interlude (Contractual Obligation Edition)

Ultimately only famous for their unfinished masterpiece, This Is Procrastination. Haven't heard it, 'though I gather there've been a bootlegged version floating around the internet for years.