Just have to share - Collage Culture: Nostalgia and Critique

Richard Hamilton, “self-portrait” for the cover of Living Arts no. 2, 1963. Photograph: Robert Freeman

Martha Rosler, Photo-op from House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home, New Series, collage, 2004

Linder, Untitled, collage, 1977

Most studies of collage published to date have tended to treat the subject in art historical terms. Today, collage is thriving but its enduring attraction goes largely unexplained. In a new book, Collage Culture: Readymades, Meaning, and the Age of Consumption (Rodopi), David Banash develops a theory of the origins and meaning of collage that views the combination of readymade elements as central to 20th-century culture.

Artists in every medium, he argues, “turn to collage to respond to the possibilities and limits of an inescapable consumer culture.”

 To read the full Design Observer interview by Rick Poyner click here