mass fetish introspection vehicle #2

I love Pop art! At least, I certainly think I do. In this, I’m not alone.
Of course, this level of fame is necessarily restricted to the few.
Appropriation is an accepted strategy in the art world.
All those images and words that swim around our heads, or that we find crumpled in the street, or pick up off the floor: they are ours to use.
I LIKE to alter things, obscure things, dirty them up, change them, make my mark on them... but then that is MY art.

Writing literary criticism has everything to do with defining one's terms.
Certainly confirmation of the presence of these separate characteristics and qualities can be made if we collect evidence
Leave it to the bureaucrats...

It is with some puzzlement that I find myself on a plane to Los Angeles.
The fact that it also spawned an interesting set of discussion must not be ignored.
Retracing the evolution of the use of the term Pop may be instructive.  
reinforcement of one's own biases is always a comforting retreat
Prejudice has a way of sustaining itself; 
when it can't be prescriptive, it can always be patronizing.
But let us also note that this is not the postmodernist's pastiche.
My tools in this examination include textual love, 
Romantic conventions, reading verbs, 
and the injunction to speak within what T. E. Hulme called "gaps"
language is a place of feeling and not a map of directions for it
the critic listens to what a text has to say. 
Such a stance requires experiencing it `by the personality as a whole,' 
living with it on an unconscious as well as a conscious level.
knowledge [of ourselves] is lying dormant in the dictionary.
This is a poetry of memory: other people’s memory.
ask: Whose history? For whom are these statements meaningful?
Do they remain coherent and habitable, 
with characteristic values, practices, and styles?
So are you God now? ... Is it you running the show?
Too many paths to cross, too many contradictions to create
giving rise to extra-rational experiences and effects.
It forms a crazy amalgamation of concepts extended and explored 
by a diverse group of museum directors and curators, art  historians,
psychologists, philosophers, and critics with tactile richness and luminescence.
Fashion produces and organizes the language of popular consumer culture:
a never-ending, perennial fountain of spontaneous, self-existent joy and happiness; a sheltering circle from which they venture to hunt for more life.
These objectives may seem to be too simple for some:
to enfold and collide a polyphany of voices and textual play, while keeping the paradigmatic postmodern themes of interpretation, ambiguous
messages, cybernetics, cognition, and information as it’s central thrust
while seeking not only utopian possibilities but transcendence itself.