Oliver Wunsch, "Watteau, through the Cracks,” pp. 37–60.
Antoine Watteau’s paintings decayed rapidly. Soon after his death, his contemporaries bemoaned the cracks ravaging his works. They regarded the problem as the product of Watteau’s restless character, noting that his shortsighted personality led him to paint improperly. A deeper explanation situates Watteau’s impatient attitude and impermanent techniques within an emerging culture of ephemeral consumption. An examination of the afterlife of Watteau’s decaying work in the form of reproduction points to an alternative understanding of permanence based less on material immutability than on commercial dissemination. Permanence has a history, and Watteau offers insight into a crucial transition.
Jennifer Quick, "Pasteup Pictures: Ed Ruscha’s Every Building on the Sunset Strip,” pp. 124–152.
Ed Ruscha’s 1960s books, among his best-known works, have long been considered touchstones of Conceptual art. Despite their renown, there has been little discussion of their relation to the technical knowledge and economics of post–World War II commercial art—another key context for Conceptual art. The analysis of Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966) demonstrates that Ruscha deployed pasteup layout as a means of thinking through art’s representational capacities, perceptual structures, and communicative potential. Ruscha’s “pasteup pictures” embody his navigation between the worlds of art and design, shedding light on Conceptual art’s ideational nature and its formulation of artistic labor.