The headline is still startling decades later.

Autobiography reveals gaps, and not only gaps in time and space or between the individual or the social, but also a widening divergence between the manner and matter of its discourse. That is, autobiography reveals the impossibility of its own dream: what begins on the presumption of self-knowledge ends in the creation of a fiction that covers over the premises of its construction.

Keith Moxey

Is autobiography nothing but fiction? Keith Moxey on the death of the subject in art, here.

matthewsgallery reblogged

dannie-x-o-blog

Traits of Postmodernism

Irony

noun

The expression of one’s meaning by using language that normally signifies the opposite, typically for humorous or emphatic effect.

Ambiguity

noun

The quality of being open to more than one interpretation; inexactness.

Appropriation

noun

The act of taking something for your own use without permission

Pastiche

noun

A work of art that imitates the style and/or materials of another artist or period.

matthewsgallery

Recipe for postmodernism. Would you add any ingredients?

More art history.

matthewsgallery reblogged

johnhorne66

Barabara Kruger

matthewsgallery

Messages from Barbara.

More art history.

matthewsgallery reblogged

sambwmn

One of its recurring themes is the possibility of short-circuiting the history of art as a means of ushering in a new paradigm. “You have to know art history in order to be able to overcome it,” Benjamin argues. If the aspiration to “overcome” art history seems imperious—most people today don’t see art history as an enemy to be defeated, nor capitalism as a system to be abolished—these essays remind us that the idea of modern art, as we know it today, is essentially an century-old narrative that finds its terminus in the morass of contemporary postmodernism, and that something different and for now unimaginable will necessarily have to come next, sooner or later.

Adam Leith Gollner; "An Investigation Into the Reappearance of Walter Benjamin" (via sambwmn)

More thoughts on art.