More abstract in form, these works are intensely claustrophobic works, saturated with sadness and disillusionment. In a 1997 interview, Sherman explained that she started creating these images in an effort to more deeply examine and then transcend ordinary conceptions of beauty. I like making images that from a distance seem kind of seductive, colorful, luscious and engaging, and then you realise what you are looking at is something totally opposite. It seems boring to me to pursue the typical idea of beauty, because that is the easiest or the most obvious way to see the world. Not all of this is successful.
Some photographs are simply too clever or self-conscious.
The images are little more than smug parodies of classical art portraiture and make no emotional connection, or provoke any inner exploration by the viewer. They contain none of the intense irreverence of the best Dadaist work or the mysterious radicalism of the Surrealists. History has no value, other than what it can provide for the immediate needs of those studying it. Sherman emerged in the rarified New York art scene during the 1980s. So while the art market was booming, the artistic and intellectual life was being hollowed out with a predominance of overrated and mainly unemotional work.