A concatenation of forces surrounded the rise of the photographic to the center of contemporary art practice. During the sixties the author-function was seriously critiqued. Roland Barthes announced the death of the author in 1967, and Michel Foucault answered his own question, what is an author? deconstructively in 1969, replacing what William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley had already termed the intentional fallacy with a model of the cultural constructedness of all notions of creative agency. At the same time, notions of (...) automatism generated by psychoanalytic models of mind and dada and surrealist conceptions of artistic and literary practice joined forces with sixties anticanonical, postexpressionist notions of the artwork as the deskilled, mechanical product of a consumerist society whose forces yielded the fantasy of individual will. Meanwhile, also during the sixties, painters such as Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg began to use found photographs very overtly either as part and parcel of the generative process of their work or inside their work along with other kinds of materials. And thus the medium-specific boundaries between the photographic and the painterly, just to take the two, began to crumble for good, though the art-school disciplines and museum departments dedicated to these two media continued to hold sway. (shrink)