[1] The exhibition guide to Entartete Kunst contains the following statements about modern art. "And what do you create?" Hitler asked modernists about one room of the exhibit. "Misshapen cripples and cretins, women who can arouse only revulsion, men closer to beasts than to human beings, children who if they lived in such a shape would be taken for the curse of God! And this is what these cruel dabblers dare to serve up as the art of our time. . . ." (374). The text of the guide refers to another part of the exhibit as follows: "alongside the negro as the racial ideal of what was then 'modern' art, there was a highly specific intellectual ideal, namely, the idiot, the cretin, and the cripple. Even where these 'artists' have portrayed themselves or each other, the resulting faces and figures are markedly cretinous" (375). References are to Stephanie Barron, ed., "Degenerate Art": The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1991).

[2] Barron highlights these panels in "Degenerate Art," pp. 12-13.

[3] See Douglas Crimp, "Portraits of People with AIDS," Discourses of Sexuality: From Aristotle to AIDS, ed. Domna C. Stanton (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), pp. 362-88, for an argument about the artistic use and abuse of images of AIDS patients.

[4] The epiphany that put Bacon on the road to art is pertinent to the new art: "I remember looking at a dog-shit on the pavement and I suddenly realised, there it is - this is what life is like." Bacon deals in biological facts, our stink, gore, and flesh: "we are meat," he explained, "we are potential carcasses" (cited by the BBC webpage at http://www.bbc.co.uk/british_art/BACON.HTM). See the WebMuseum, Paris at http://ftp.epix.net/wm/paint/auth/bacon/ for reproductions of various works by Bacon, including Head VI (1949), Study after Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953), and Self-Portrait (1971).

[5] Bruce Weber, "Killing Frogs for Art, Student Lends Life to a Debate," The New York Times 146 (15 March 1997): 25, 26.

[6] Walter Benjamin explores, in a much read but misunderstood essay, the resources of mechanical reproduction for creating new alternatives to traditional art. He makes the case that photography, film, and lithography, among other forms, introduce profound changes in the ancient craft of the beautiful, destroying the ritual aura of the Artist and art work, enabling art to illustrate everyday life, and making art available to the masses. See Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1969), pp. 217-52. Benjamin, however, was wrong when he argued that mechanical reproduction distances art from ritual. In fact, the facility with which the technologies of mechanical reproduction represent human reality forces art to return to the scene of its emergence from ritual where the fact of human violence and the rise of signifying practices were first fused together. See René Girard, "Differentiation and Reciprocity in Lévi-Strauss and Contemporary Theory," "To Double Business Bound": Essays on Literature, Mimesis, and Anthropology (Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), pp. 155-77 and Eric Gans, Originary Thinking: Elements of Generative Anthropology (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), pp. 1-28, 117-25.

[7] See Ralph Vartabedian, "After 50-Year Exile, Bikinians Embark on Long Road Home," Los Angeles Times (24 July 1996): A5, and Nicholas D. Kristof, "Godzilla's Home Opens its Arms to Scuba Divers," The New York Times 146 (22 June 1997): Sec. 5, p. 22.

[8] See Andrew Pollack, "The End of Tragedy in Pictures," The New York Times (3 August 1997).

[9] For more information about the circumstances that brought about this image, see Patrick E. Tyler, "Plague Ravages Taiwan Pigs and Many Blame China," The New York Times 146 (19 April 1997): 5(N)-(L), col. 3.