From the library again

Rather a grizzly cover, but interesting stuff inside, and a whole lot of artists new to me. Thomas Lawson, for instance: "in his view, avant-garde art had lost its adversarial character in respect of dominant culture ... he adopted a more oblique strategy [than overtly political art] called 'dialectical re-duplication', that is, turning the means of the mass media against themselves by reappropriating their images, styles and conventions of representation. Irony, aesthetic distance, ambiguity and contradictions were deliberately cultivated to reveal the hollowness of stereotypes and to slow down the process of assimilation." The strategy of subverting the system from within by accessing the art market through using an established medium (painting) and traditional genres popular with dealers and collectors, however, didn't work out as planned - "because the flow of money had so quickly replaced the flow of ideas." Lawson continues to write and lecture.