Collector of images

Who is the artist today? How does the artist define himself? As a collector? like Rotella and Villegle (l'arpenteur de bitume/ asphalt surveyor) who are collecting urban comedy from the walls and gave their immortality in introducing them to the museums. They both wanted to experiment a new aesthetic way of doing their art. Rotella thought that in painting "everything had been done". Villegle wanted to develop a different approach. His starting points being a book La Fin du Monde,  from Blaise Cendrars with Fernand Leger's illustrations and Miro's work "Amour". In the first case, the cubist illustrations inspired him whereas Miro's statement: "Iwant to kill the painting" shoked his knowledge and initiated a process.

http://www.kb.nl/bc/koopman/1919-1925/c02-en.html

Benjamin Walter: Le collectionneur de bagatelles reputees insignifiantes.  In his book, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, B. Walter Benjamin acknowledges the reality of artistic reproduction throughout history, although he suggests that mechanical reproduction introduced an entirely new and revolutionary change in the experience of the artwork (218). With mechanical reproduction, which appears in its most radical forms in film and photography, millions of images of an original are circulated, all of which lack the “authentic” aura of their source. This process both affects and is the effect of changing social conditions in which all previously unique and sacred institutions have become equal (223). The general willingness to accept a reproduction in place of the original also signifies an unwillingness to participate in the ritualistic aesthetics and politics of earlier times.

http://modernism.research.yale.edu/wiki/index.php/The_Work_of_Art_in_the_Age_of_Mechanical_Reproduction