Ras le bol Warhol et Cie, contre la pauvreté des images (Book)

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Ras le bol Warhol et Cie, contre la pauvreté des images (Book)  by  Gérard Durozoi.. Like new, in French.

Fed up Warhol and Cie, against the poverty of images.  Is it still permissible to wonder if Warhol is as important an artist as the art world claims? And if it were rather the symptom of a weakening of art and culture whose depressing consequences we know today: omnipresence of the image which duplicates reality, suffocation of the imagination, obstinate repetition of the merchandise, rejection of complexity, accelerated circulation of information and awareness, confusion between invention and packaging, fascination with immediacy, etc. ? Warhol’s “trick” was perhaps to import reproducibility into artistic production itself – hence inviting to be satisfied with works conceived as interchangeable. If it is exemplary of pop art, it is because it has promoted the existence of merchandise (including artistic) to the detriment of any critical distance, and imposed the quantitative as a value or aesthetic criterion. Rauschenberg works on contradictory aspects of life; those who claim to be his successors remove any contradiction and only recover from “life” a mediatized imagery: by way of painting, we are only dealing with a surface without matter or depth, which contains no other meaning than that previously decided by the world of commerce. In France, the Narrative Figuration sought meaning – including political: it could not resist the planned offensive of the American pop and the grip of the vacuum that it created. Challenging the domination of all Warhol is also confirming that the United States has exported the poorest dimension of their culture.