You still have a few days left to read for free the New York Times‘ review of “Acting Out: Invented Melodrama in Contemporary Photography” at SUNY Purchase. (After the 8th, you’ll have to go to your library to read the article for free or pay the Times or stop by my office . . .)

It sounds quite interesting. Roberta Smith writes:

The exhibition “Acting Out: Invented Melodrama in Contemporary Photography,” which opens Sunday at the Neuberger Museum of Art on the campus of the State University of New York here, is a modest but focused effort that brings back old memories and differences. Specifically, it recalls a point in the early 1980’s when Douglas Crimp, a pioneering art critic, lamented in an essay the growing popularity of postmodernism’s cutting-edge strategy, appropriation.

Appropriation had begun only a few years earlier as a radical, primarily photographic practice introduced by artists like Cindy Sherman, Sherrie Levine and Richard Prince. As I remember it, Mr. Crimp’s general complaint was that appropriation was raging out of control. Conceived as a way to “interrogate” the images that inundate and condition us, it had pretty much morphed into an academic, reactionary technique used by artists of all aesthetic stripes, political viewpoints and mediums. . . .