Marcel Duchamp’s Pharmacie, 1914, Asger Jorn’s détournements, and Jim Shaw’s “Thrift Store Paintings” form just one quick route through an age in which artists have taken up Sunday still lifes and commercial prints to all manner of ends; to interrogate the status of art, they have mechanically reproduced the mechanically reproduced, prodded cultural hierarchies of taste, and adopted stock subjects to challenge the logic of the new. Quotation, appropriation, and overpainting have expressed everything from scorn to irony to nostalgia for generic popular painting.

Rendered with compelling sincerity