Digital media transformed artistic recycling from haptic nostalgia to spectacle mediation

Evidence

Warhol’s down-home phrase belongs to just that ‘nostalgic elegy’ for teenage years lived in a Golden Age of Americanism which, Wollen remarks, defined Pop Art as a whole. What could be more fifties than the refrigerator? Between such casual, haptic rifling among the preserves of the past and our postmodern present lies an electronic barrier. Today, scanning the picture-bank, surfing the net, digitalizing the image, would be more actual operations — all of them, necessarily, mediated by the oligopolies of the spectacle. — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 259

Categorization

• SEED: The refrigerator as emblem of fifties Americanism vs the electronic barrier of the net — a vivid hook for an essay on how cultural-memory objects mark period boundaries.
• CANDY: Warhol’s Pop Art as ‘nostalgic elegy’ for the Golden Age of the refrigerator — a quotable, image-rich observation.