Appropriation in photography

Just before the show "Acting Out: Invented Melodrama in Contemporary Photography" Roberta Smith wrote a piece for the New York Times. The show featured young artists and brought back old memories and differences. Specifically, it recalls a point in the early 1980′s when Douglas Crimp, a pioneering art critic, lamented in an essay the growing popularity of postmodernism’s cutting-edge strategy, appropriation. 

Appropriation had begun only a few years earlier as a radical, primarily photographic practice introduced by artists like Cindy Sherman, Sherrie Levine and Richard Prince. As I remember it, Mr. Crimp’s general complaint was that appropriation was raging out of control. Conceived as a way to “interrogate” the images that inundate and condition us, it had pretty much morphed into an academic, reactionary technique used by artists of all aesthetic stripes, political viewpoints and mediums. . . .

You can read the article in its entirety here

Richard Prince from Cowboys