What was wrong with art in the last 15 years of the 20th Century? “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.” – The Guardian