ABSTRACT
The way in which John Baldessari, Richard Prince, and the artists in the Pictures show made pictures of pictures interested not only Douglas Crimp and Craig Owens but other art critics who wrote for a new quarterly art-theoretical journal named October, founded in 1976. It promoted the Pictures aesthetic as part of a campaign it waged against formalism and modernism using as its weapons postmodernist ideas and approaches culled from the writings of Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Lacan, and other French intellectuals. The New Art Associations manifesto was formulated at the height of the Vietnam War, and it reflected the politicization of the generation of young scholars that questioned the basic assumptions of every intellectual discipline. Attacks on conventional art history and criticism intensified as the 1970s progressed, particularly as feminist art theory developed in scope and persuasiveness.
