“What haunts the digital cul-de-sacs of the twenty-first century is not so much the past

as all the lost futures that the twentieth century taught us to anticipate.”

Mark Fisher 

FOREVER CHANGED takes its title from a Lou Reed and John Cale song about their friend and mentor, Andy Warhol’s death. The song implies that after Warhol our world has been irreversibly changed. The big idea is that rather than having a critical distance from the subject, in the case of many post-war artists this was culture itself, today’s artists are living inside it. It’s as if we all find ourselves living in one big Warhol. 

Through the works of several major contemporary artists, we gain an important perspective on this difficult moment in which the future we believed in was slowly cancelled. 

This future is divorced from a past nostalgia that failed to predict where we would end up. A moment of ultra-hybridity, sees artists re-purposing existing materials, images, words, and technologies. Authorship is eroded and challenged as they appropriate the historical backstory of their own works. These cliched tropes become humorous, potent, and at moments insightful.