…but before we can even begin there is a problem, a troubling and irreducible problem that threatens to engulf you and I dear reader. Let’s take a minute to reflect on what has transpired and escape this mire that has us in its grasp.

What we have been presented with is a sophomoric essay question followed, inexplicably by an image (or meme2) with border of Islamic calligraphy around it. All of this has been set into the introduction of an art theory essay, a poor start. How would we read a situation like this if it were an artwork in this foul year of our lord, 2010? (And where would we begin?) Should we start with the wolf image or with the quotation from the 18^th century English author Samuel Johnson?[1] Perhaps the best place to start is with the history of text in art, or would a definition of quotation and appropriation be the place to begin? What about language or the deconstruction of language in art or semiotics? How does this quote even relate to the image or our essay? Are there psychoanalytical readings to be made here? Ethnographic concerns? Sociological concerns? Technological ones? How does poor old Samuel Johnson fit in and what is our connection to what he is saying speaking to us from beyond the grave, through the centuries and countless other voices?

The contemporary art world today presents the artist with an unmanageable wellspring of conceptual concerns multiplying like the heads of a Hydra out of an unprecedented freedom in modern artistic methods. In this essay ideas are to be thought of as reflective surfaces creating infinite tunnels when placed next to one another. Let’s take a short journey down one of these fictitious passages and see where we end up.

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2 http://encyclopediadramatica.com/Meme

[1] This quote is not only a quote from Johnson but is also a quote of a quote taken from another source, the beginning of Hunter S. Thompsons ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’.