The era during which the work in this show was largely conceived, made and collected—the last quarter of the 20th century—witnessed the rise to great popularity among curators and collectors of an art of gadgetry and mechanical technique, with a philosophical vocabulary (borrowed from the social sciences) to complement it. The issues raised by this art of camera, videocam, computerized printing, digital image manipulation and so on were peculiar to a culture of machines: reproducibility, copy and copyright, authenticity, originality, the ontological status of the ready-made, or this or that mechanical replica. Moral questions, the discussion of ethical imperatives, were as deeply unfashionable among opinion-makers in the art world as in the world at large, where relativism and skepticism, the values of the social sciences, prevailed. (The last notable, credible moral art-world thunderings were pronounced some 20 years ago, by Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, when he laid a curse on the new European painting for its presumed crypto-fascism.)

I am not suggesting things in the period 1975-1999 could have been otherwise. Many in the generation that came of age in the 1960s, my generation, were left exhausted, by the mid-1970s, by the excess, hedonism and shallow idealism of the counterculture—by its extravagant proposals for liberation.

But without the connection to the world provided by moral discourse, the inner world of the 1970s became purely psychological, imaginary, obsessed by the fluid dynamics of sex and power. Ideas—real ideas, I mean, carrying moral conviction and leading to principled courses of action—carried less and less weight. The mental landscape of "Partners" inevitably reflects this desolate world of the late 20th century, its psychic homeland—the era's narrowed vision and emotional range, its diminished ambitions and withdrawn hopes.