Why KAWS's Global Success May Well Be a Symptom of a Depressed Culture, Adrift in Nostalgia and Retail Therapy
Small H Landscape (2001). (Photo by Ben Davis) An artist like KAWS is the best avatar: His main artistic device is to appropriate a familiar cartoon, tweak it, then tweak that tweaked appropriation again, and on and on, developing his own freestanding world. A genre of YouTube movie criticism you see a lot these days is centered around parsing the lore of the big pop nostalgia mythologies. “Criticism” is actually the wrong word—it’s more like the cataloging of Easter eggs, the spotting of background references and links to source material and fan theories. Vast empires of content are ...
Source: artnet.com