Brett Olson

The art of the past no longer exists as it once did. Its authority is lost. In its place there is a language of images. What matters now is who uses that language for what purpose. This touches upon questions of copyright for reproduction, the ownership of art presses and publishers, the total policy of public art galleries and museums. As usually

that anything could be validated as long as one could find the correct strategies for getting and holding the attention of the media. In art, this became aggravated by the sudden rush of art investment – not yet the mania it would become in the seventies, but large enough nearly to abolish, for a time, the idea that an artist’s thought and performa

But its effect has not been (as artists in the twenties hoped) to convey us towards the heart of reality, wherever that organ may be, but rather to insulate and estrange us from reality itself, turning everything into disposable spectacle: catastrophe, love, war, soap. Ours is the cult of the electronic fragment.

Their definition of culture was dominated by two large facts. First, cultural alternatives were now multiple, not vertically ranked; they spread across a field of choice generated by mass production and machine reproduction, and did not rise from the corner sweetshop to the Athenaeum Club. Second, books and painting were no longer socially dominant

During the fifties, some American artists began to realize what the Dadaists in Europe had known about three decades before: that there might be a subject in this landscape of waste, this secret language of junk, because societies reveal themselves in what they throw away.

If one buys a half-pound of bacon in a supermarket, one gets an ounce and a half of cardboard and plastic wrapping with it. If one stocks up on toilet items in a drugstore, razor, blades, shaving soap, lip-salve, they leave a pyramid of packaging behind. If an electric iron goes on the fritz, who takes it to the repairman? It is easier to get a new

But in their time, the forties and fifties, Davis’s images of mass culture were on their own. They ran counter to the romantic mainstream, and did not belong to the conventions that Surrealism had engendered. No other major American artists were ready to go so far into the badlands of other media, or to do it with that uniquely balanced mixture of

What was more, he expected it to do so at the high tide of American materialism, when all the agreements about doctrine and symbol that had given the religious artists of the past their subjects had been cancelled. Rothko would have needed a miracle to bring this off, and the miracle, naturally enough, did not happen. But his efforts to make it do

Brancusi ignored Expressionism by asserting that a stone could be as full of meaning as anything it might be made to represent. His attitude would have been understood at once in Japan, where a whole cultural context deriving from Buddhism lay ready for it: and in fact it was not a European but a Japanese-American named Isamu Noguchi (b. 1904) who,