Fatal Attraction: Art and the Media

"To consume in America is not to buy; it is to dream. Advertising is the suggestion that the dream of entering the third person singular might possibly be fulfilled." -Don DeLillo These are the artists who put the load-bearing post in postmodern, making the visual politics of media, marketplace and patriarchy the crucial issues for the 1980s: Sarah Charlesworth, Eric Bogosian, Nancy Dwyer, Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger, Robert Longo, Richard Prince, David Salle, Cindy Sherman. A Fatal Attraction brought these and other artists who share these concerns together at a seminal point in this movement. This exhibition catalogue is a valuable reference for scholarship of this period of contemporary art, not to mention a cultural relic from an important moment in recent art history. Tom Lawson's essay links the artists within a set of shared concerns-deconstruction of institutionalized pleasure, demystification of representation-that follow from the discourse of 1960s and 70s conceptual art, but takes this critique of ideology from the insulated art world out into the streets and living rooms of America.