retro-quotes: a series of germane remarks, by others, plucked from all over the place, and from all over the time - #34

"Appropriation art is informed by the decadence syndrome: the sense of the decline and impending death of art. This is expressed as a feeling of deja vu and a sense of art's loss of significant human purpose - its inability to afford an important perspective on the lifeworld - as well as on the wish for rejuvenation. This wish is expressed by envious exploitation and subordination - veritable colonization -- of avant-garde art that had been vitally alive and had startled the world with its revolutionary ambition, as though to suck the dregs of that faded vitality and ambition from it. But whatever the morbid nostalgia of appropriation art touches turns to stone."

--Donald Kuspit, The Cult of the Avant-Garde Artist, 1993