Numerous incidents have been reported in recent years wherein a work of art is mistaken as trash. The question is, how have people reached the point in the civilized world where a purported work of art cannot be distinguished from a pile of rubbish or a grid of condensation pipes? The answer to that question lies in the basic assumption of nearly…

This author contends that it is sometimes difficult to construe exactly what the visual culture movement really involves. To use the kind of lingo that its spokespersons favor, we are seeing a conflict between transfigured factions surviving from the 1960s. During that fevered era, it appeared to academic liberals that America was becoming…