Fredric Jameson
[Writer and theoretician, b. 1934, Cleveland, Ohio, lives in Durham, North Carolina.]

 The visual is essentially pornographic, which is to say that it has its end in rapt, mindless fascination. 
 The retrospective dimension indispensable to any vital reorientation of our collective future [has] become a vast collection of images... a series of pure and unrelated presents in time. 
 In a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, all that is left is to imitate dead styles… Contemporary or postmodernist art… will involve the necessary failure of art and the aesthetic, the failure of the new, the imprisonment in the past.