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For many people born after 1950, these assumptions seem haughty, obsolete and no longer binding. Not only the fantasies but some of the ways of seeing that lie behind much current American art are shaped and administered by TV. Obviously, a generation that has been glued to the electronic nipple of American kitsch from infancy, imbibing its ultrafast changes of images, its giggly cool, its fixation on celebrity and its horror of argument, will tend to produce a kind of art that is
centerless, devoid of any vision of nature or mastery of hand: at best a mere cultural reflection, at worst a lie.
One of the effects of an information-based culture, whose dominant form of social dreaming is TV, is to undercut the authority of historical models by reducing the audience's attention span and sorting out its art experience into smaller, more alienated, less structured units. As the crowd of artworks grows, each single one seems a bit weaker.
This draining of the sense of the masterpiece affects both present and past. It makes past art look ghostly and value-free, so that it can be quoted and ^ shuffled at will, without deference to the values it once embodied. Hence the postmodern assault on the chief form of classical modernist painting, abstract art. A general culture glut opens the present to a limitless eclecticism and disarms taste by making everything "interesting." And, as the critic Charles Newman argues in the most provocative book on this problem yet written by an American, The Post-Modern Aura, its net effect is inflation: the permeability the past has acquired is the natural ground of hype in the present.
A glutted, media-based eclecticism being the order of the day, artists shape their means to it. Their main "strategy" (how the art world loves military lingo!) is "appropriation," or image scavenging, a process somewhat different from the traditional ways in which Western art has always quoted other art. Images have been recycled within the fine-arts tradition almost since art began. The Cnidian Venus turns into a Boucher, an Ingres, a Matisse. Picasso runs 44 variations on Velasquez's Las Meninas. Always, art comes from other art, giving culture a vernacular of recurrent forms, which are reinvested with subtly or sharply different meanings. In this way, the artist connects himself to the living tissue of the past, legitimately claiming continuity.
Yet appropriation as practiced by Americans in the '80s is the exact reverse of this process. It presumes discontinuity. It is not a gesture of homage to an esteemed original. In fact it does not agree that any image has more authority than any other. It is a response to a culture of reproduction. Its posture is a melange of acquiescence and mild pessimism: acquiescence in the thick smog of images now dumped on the eye by "high" and "low" culture alike, pessimism about painting's ability to pierce or dispel it with authentically rooted meanings.