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FP wrote: "You can use anything you want - abstraction, even cliche - as long as it is somehow recontextualized, revitalized." I agree completely. And isn't that, in a nutshell, the definition of post-modernism? Such is the case in the visual arts. Out with the long list of reductive verbotens; to hell with the strictures, fling open the gates that Modernism so systematically welded shut. All that matters is whether it works, whether it breathes Anything is possible. Corpses can be resurrected. Odd Nerdrum, as Dr Frankenstein, appalled his professors in the 1970s by painting like a seventeenth-century master. 'You can't paint in that dead style', they told him, and threw him out of the university. But across Europe, shows of his 'dead' paintings became sold-out sensations. Walking into a gallery of his paintings can cause immediate & permanent re-orientation. bj