A painting loses its meaning as symbolic act once its originating situation is lost

Evidence

I first want to suggest that if this copiously reproduced image is not to sink to the level of sheer decoration, it requires us to reconstruct some initial situation out of which the finished work emerges. Unless that situation — which has vanished into the past — is somehow mentally restored, the painting will remain an inert object, a reified end product impossible to grasp as a symbolic act in its own right, as praxis and as production. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 50

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s waning-of-affect framework: the loss of the work’s ‘situation’ is part of how modernist art degrades into postmodern decoration. — connects to: Industrial-era art loses its concrete human center as elements disperse into contingency. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 346; Symbolism arises only after objects have lost immediate meaning — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 349; Meaning can be transmitted while the lived spirit behind words is lost. (+4 more)
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Industrial-era art loses its concrete human center as elements disperse into contingency. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 346; Symbolism arises only after objects have lost immediate meaning — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 349; Meaning can be transmitted while the lived spirit behind words is lost. (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Loss of commonly held symbolic meaning generates a sense of immediacy #complicates (0.72) — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 98