To reframe Picasso's famously pithy remark "good artists copy, and great artists steal" for the contemporary art scene, appropriation can be used in an artist's work to borrow authority from history, or to subvert it.
The iconoclasm of the latter can be satirical, as in Yasumasa Morimura's pastiches of canonical images from Wstern art history, or loftily disengaged, like Thomas Struth's observations of museum visitors looking at paintings.
Anne Collier's "Women with Cameras" slideshow of 1970s found photography, at the Rat Hole Gallery, is compelling because, rather than following either of those paths, it evokes affection, but also provokes intellectual rigor in equal measure.
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