Art as Commodity as Art
Christopher Townsend discusses the legacy of the Pictures Generation and MTV
The Pictures Generation artists of the early 1980s – Robert Longo, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman et al – who emerged just as MTV muscled up alongside the young field of video art, set about dissolving the boundaries between art and the techniques of mass culture. But by adopting forms that had been thoroughly co-opted by the engine of commercial production, was the space for critical subjectivity fatally compromised?
‘While Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, inter alia, provide critiques of the desubjectivising effects of modernity through the individual’s separation from both culture and history as far back as the 1840s, I suggest that these effects achieve a particular specificity in the historical time and geographical space of the Pictures Generation and MTV.’
The programme is hosted by Matt Hale who has worked at Art Monthly since 1991.
Previous episodes are available on Art Monthly’s website www.artmonthly.co.uk/events.htm
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