Would it help if theory informed artistic creation? The stifling effect of the new academy: The art of the late 20th century has been long on pseudo-profundity and short on popular audience. But no matter, it still sells.

For a number of reasons, art had given up
the ghost under the weight of theory. The
breakdown of distinctions between high
and popular culture led to all manner of
cultural produce and effluent being sifted
and read as text. We were top heavy with
theorists (not to mention curators), who
needed scant visual stimulus to write the
work into the flat ergo of post-modernist
irony: in short, what we had was
nominalism. Artworks merely had to ring
the appropriate bell to set the Pavlovian
critics slavering for interpretation…

NB: some advice on deconstructing
current critical terminology: simply
replace “not” for “post”, so that
post-modern, post-conceptual and
post-ironic become not new, not clever
and not funny. The Guardian