Jeff Wall’s boxed-in, backlit, Cibachrome images have a crisp, clear sense of trespass. His format—appropriated from the world of advertising—takes ultrastudied, art-historically derived images across the line that separates media culture from high art.

This is sacrosanct territory for appropriation art: the place where art and commerce conduct proprietorial battle over the image. Wall’s contribution is in making an appropriation art that refuses to settle the score, refuses almost to play the game. All that’s left is a kind of brute visibility, an image where the ideological constructs of