Douglas,

Thanks for your last post. I owe you an apology, I misinterpreted your earlier comments about impressionism. I thought you were suggesting that the whole of impressionism was a marketing ploy.

It is interesting that the works of the artists you mention all read as 'modern' to the contempory eye. Impressionism itself remains powerful in the popular consciousness despite coming to an end a century ago.

I understand your position regarding the death of painting. What I do not yet understand is what it is that gives you confidence that painting will recover from the malaise in which it currently finds itself. If a recovery is to be possible we must solve the problem of the observer.

Finally, and this may be off the track again, but I have been rethinking my earlier position that 'modernism died with the passing of POP.' I think I lied - not so much about the death of modernism but about the passing of POP. This may sound a little wierd but I think POP and 'mass culture' became joined at the hip and it still exists as a growing organism. Not in painting, though. It is as if POP solved Art.

Now, if POP solved Art then the death of modernism was not death but a transformation from so-called High Art to popular culture. Is this a dumbing down of Art or the holy grail which modernism fought for?

When we watch the new Kylie video are we watching the latest fruit of the modernism tree?

So, what is Postmodernism (a horrible word, by the way)? Is it a reaction against the popularization of Art or the collective products of a bunch of artists who missed the point?

I lay awake at night thinking of such things. That probably makes me sad and pitiful.