ABSTRACT
Slawomir Magala was active in the 1980s as a commentator on contemporary art and culture in the broader context of cultural and social communication and interaction. Based on first-hand experience of the United States, this chapter discusses a number of artistic tendencies in the 1970s and early 1980s: from Post-Minimalism and Post-Modernism to Land art and Environmental art. It demonstrates how what could be considered as Andy Warhol’s contribution to art and displayed in galleries and codified by critics has gradually been replaced in Warhol’s oeuvre by the “processing” of his own fame and the fame of others as the central object of his artistic output. In his study of Post-Minimalism, Robert Pincus-Witten noticed that contemporary adventures with Conceptual art were accompanied by a certain split into pure epistemology, an art based on the manipulation of dematerialized information, and an art with ontological certainty directed towards a materialist and material anchoring.
