What is the paradigm for artistic practice that Vincent Desiderio is advocating for instead of postmodernism’s cultural bulimia

In this essay I will investigate the 2004 oil painting Cockainge made by the American realist painter Vincent Desiderio, depicting a dinner table bearing plates of half-eaten food amidst a shambolic display of opened monographs, bearing on their pages prints of masterpieces of art history scattered around the circumference of the table. The investigation will involve a visual and contextual analysis of the painting, which will be interwoven. In my analysis I will offer interpretation of Desiderio statement in the New York times as being a “critique of cultural bulimia- our compulsive consumption of images which leaves us hungry for more.” (Fineman,2004) My interpretation being that Desiderio is critiquing the postmodernisms preoccupation with art which comments about the process of art and its social context in which it was made, rather than expressing the subjectivity experience of its maker, which postmodernism sees as derivative to the culture in which the maker is situated. As well as critiquing it’s anything goes attitude with regards to how artistic influences can be utilised by artists.