Resumen de The image valued 'as found' and the reconfiguring of mimesis in post-war art
Pop and new realist painting, with its deployment of prefabricated images circulating in the mass media, is conventionally seen as operating in a mode like the readymade and as rejecting traditional mimesis. This essay argues that the artistic process involved is better understood as a kind of mimesis in which imagery taken 'as found' is variously replicated and modified while being realized in a medium of some kind. An approach to artistic fabrication in which the basic form of the image is taken as given, so it retains a charge inherent in its existence as cultural or natural artefact, independent of the artist's subjective impulses, is hardly particular to this post-war moment in the history of art. What was rejected, it is argued, was a very particular post-Romantic understanding of depiction in which the shaping of the image was valued for conveying an artist's imaginative response to something seen or imagined.
