Postmodernism

I'm glad this piece was on van Gogh because it gave me a new perspective on my artist. I also really appreciated his statement about how reproduced the peasant shoes painting is and how it has become a decoration. There are many famous works of art that I take for granted and have never seriously examined or even thought about for more than a few minutes. We see the Mona Lisa everywhere, people use waterlilies as a computer background, Warhol's works are in every college dorm on posters. I think this degrades the images. I remember when I saw Stary Night at the MOMA and I was so taken aback that I stared at it for 20 minutes. At first, all I wanted to do was take a million photos of it to look back on, but then I realized that if I just took the time to look closely enough and really examine it and think about it, I wouldn't need a pixelated phone camera image to look back on. For this reason the following sentence really stood out to men, "Unless that situation--which has vanished into the past-- is somehow mentally restored, the painting will remain an inert object, a refined end product impossible to grasp as a symbolic act in its own right, as praxis and as production."

- "a world reduced to its most brutal and menaced, primitive state," (7).
-  "the work of art emerges in the gap between the Earth and the World." (7)
- "the role of the photographic negative in contemporary art" (9).
- "Although this kind of death of the world of appearance becomes thematized in certain Warhol pieces, this is not a matter of content any longer but of some more fundamental mutation both in the object world itself-- now become a set of texts or simulacra-- and in the disposition of the subject."
- "the waning of affect in postmodern culture" (at first I didn't understand this but now I completely agree!

I also think that it is very interesting and clever/ eye-opening to compare van Gogh and Warhol because while they are both certainly talented artists, they seem like apples and oranges, well, actually, kiwis and carrots (so completely different that you can't possibly compare the two. However, I think this way of looking at it, my previous way, is very close-minded and a result of society today focusing on only what is right in front of us rather than the whole picture.