How Jim Shaw birthed a new era of appropriation

VULTURE
By Jerry Saltz

Jesus and Babies Over Mountain Pool Landscape, Matlock

Magpie-eyed artist Jim Shaw has spent most of his career in the shadows of his good friends and colleagues Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy. Yet Shaw is his own breed of appropriation artist who both does and doesn't fit his generation. His appropriation has a distinct, self-effacing quirky generosity about it — something encyclopedic, delirious, manic that helped perpetuate and detonate lots of subsequent ideas about styles of two-dimensional rendering, including calendar and fashion illustration, pulp fiction and pinup depiction, porn, and other semi-looked-down-on or low approaches to art. [link]