They idealize little and disarm no one. They value less the intimacy of the family album than Alice in Wonderland's innocence, irony, and favorite dirty old man. They search less for the old creature comforts than for fantasy, truth, and transformation. In their hands the old, seemingly opposed sentiments still hold, but because they have so much in common. For one thing, both insist, artists never give up the freedom to think, to feel, and to explore.
Any act of creation amounts to a gamble, with the outcome unsure.
These artists look not for the singleness of the family snapshot but the disjunction between memories and the games the past plays with adult life. Both share something else with Freud and TV, too. They all project a sense of ordinary life as something remote, somehow seen from outside. The hard work of play Like TV, the show positively revels in postmodern cool. Its two halves neatly dance around the age of Freud.