Appropriation art was a practical form of the ideological critique of consumer culture that Barthes developed in Mythologies (1957), according to Benjamin Buchloh.

the hijacking of dominant words and images to create insubordinate, counter messages. Above all, appropriation art was justified via the ideas of Jean Baudrillard

Baudrillard announced a grim world of simulation and simulacra and expressed surprise when these ideas were quickly picked up by artists and critics in New York, to become another way of discussing the art of appropriation. （p13）

The readymade, collage and montage are presented as the three innovations of

the historic avant-gardes that cumulatively register this fundamental transition.

without which any notion of contemporary appropriation art is unimaginable. （p15）

Crimp concludes with some acute predictions that radical appropriation art, like Prince's rephotographs of advertisements or Sherman's film stills, will lose much of its use value once it becomes safely accommodated in the art museum. (p21)

It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. (p80)

A painting's meaning lies not in its origin, but in its destination. The birth of the viewer must be at the cost of the painter. (p81)

However, the negativity of this work, located in its humour, can merely serve to congratulate its viewers on their contemptuous acuity. Perhaps the problem is one of implicitness, that what is needed is, again, an alternation, not only called 'from primary to secondary', but from implicit to explicit, from inference to declaration. (p106)

Appropriation became a method that one assumed would stand up to alienation. This was due to the concept of a strong artistic subject, which ultimately would remain in control of the situation. And yet the signs of alienation, which restricted the power to validity of the subject, were unmistakable. (p216)

his suggestion that alienation itself could be appropriated.

their alienation, themselves. Seen from this perspective, the idea of not being in control of oneself is a status quo that cannot be reversed. Appropriation provides the possibility to find a stance vis-à-vis this status quo, to appropriate it.(p217)