Art after Appropriation: Essays on Art in the 1990s

Rating:
Summary: About time
Review: I can't say I've been delighted about much art-writing the last 5 or 6 years. Welchman gets 5 stars for doing the foot-work while not misplacing his head. His book looks at an interesting mix of artists, takes some risks, and cobbles together an interesting theory... and, quite frankly, much of what he says is not only correct, but has really needed to be said for some time now. It seems that much writing about art has gotten so niche-oriented or arbitrary that Welchman's approach is welcome. By rehashing the legacy of appropriation, something that we thought the art world had already figured out, Welchman springs through the unguarded front doors of mainstream discourse in an expansive manner.