ABSTRACT
Postmodern appropriation art suggests a similar decadence, a similar loss of creative imagination, a similar submission, capitulation, to tradition: the tradition of the new, as Harold Rosenberg called it, following Baudelaire's lead. Baudelaire, 'The Salon of 1859', is the credo of modernism: 'the furthest depths of the soul' is the unconscious, and in modernity the unconscious is the artist's muse. Modernism became habitual and likeable, and rewarded with commercial success and art historical recognition. It had not only arrived, but been institutionalized. It began attacking 'museum art', as Clement Greenberg contemptuously called it, but it had become museum art. Novelty art was a perpetual motion machine for producing the new, as though it was an aesthetic end in itself, and inherently valuable, and as such all that art needed to have credibility, significance, success. Creativity involves a modernizing response to the motif, transforming it so that it bespeaks contemporary human as well as artistic concerns.
