ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Thomas Demand's Pacific Sun, published in his recent collection Another Light: Jacques-Louis David to Thomas Demand, Michael Fried makes a series of remarks on what he calls a "new emphasis on intention in contemporary art. Fried can be seen aligning both Demand and Charles Ray with a certain post-postmodernism, which he understands as coming after the critique of intentionality characteristic of postmodernism. Fried recognizes, the visible difference between art and objecthood has shrunk to virtually nothing and it may be impossible ultimately to defeat theater. Like Stanley Cavell's problem of skepticism, Fried's system of absorption and theatricality is not fundamentally historical and descriptive but symbolic and prescriptive. For all of the polemical energy Fried invests in the conflict between art and literalism, however, the distinction between them is fine, and perhaps getting finer.
