CULTURE AS NATURE/THE FUTURE THAT WAS

VOL.7 - CULTURE AS NATURE: Culture replaced nature as the subject-matter for many artists in the 20th century. Modern art has had to survive against an overwhelming flood of other messages from print, radio, advertising, photography and television. Pop art exploded onto the scene. Artists had long been fascinated with ads, posters, dime novels and signs-the emblems of mass produced consciousness, of speedy transmission of blatant meaning. The cubists inserted pop material into their paintings, as did the Dadaists and the Surrealists. Stuart Davis was inspired by jazz, the bright lights of Broadway and the brash signage of the American cityscape in the '30s. The flood gates really opened in the 1950s with the advent of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. Media provided new material and subjects for Warhol, Lichtenstein, Rosenquist and Oldenburg. VOL. 8 - THE FUTURE THAT WAS: The old tension between the Academy and the new has vanished. Modernism is our institutional culture today. The consequences: neutralization of art by high market prices; the incestuous interlocking structures of museum and dealer; the attempts at a flight from this highly-organized system into conceptual art, earthworks, body art, art as not salable and not open to discussion; gradual but now complete fragmentation of the avant-garde; doubts about the future of painting; assimilation of self-expression to blatant narcissism, of contest to mere promotion, and finally, the death of the idea of the art movement as such.