cultural bulimia:

Our compulsive consumption of images that only leaves us hungry for more.

Cockaigne
Vincent Desiderio
1193-2003
oil on canvas

The title is a reference to Pieter Bruegel the Elder's "Land of Cockaigne" (1559), a moral allegory set in a land of plenty where the houses are tiled with cakes, the fences are made of sausages and the fowl fly roasted and ready to eat. The targets in Bruegel's painting were gluttony and sloth; Mr. Desiderio's version is a critique of what he calls "cultural bulimia" — our compulsive consumption of images that only leaves us hungry for more. It is also a comment on the predicament of painting in the 21st century: faced with such a plethora of styles and formal idioms, how is it possible to create something new, something distinctively relevant to our own time? "Cockaigne" is one artist's response to what the critic Harold Bloom called the "anxiety of influence," an attempt, in Mr. Desiderio's words, "to reconfigure the history of art in order to create imaginative space for ourselves."
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