There’s no mystery as to why so many contemporary artists want to work with imagery that’s derived from the movies. Movie culture is just about the only artistic culture that is any longer capable of bringing together a broad range of the public. Talking about Daniel Day-Lewis’s performance as a paraplegic in My Left Foot, or our reactions to the black comedy of Paul Mazursky’s Enemies, a Love Story, offers us an easy, livery form of social interaction. As we find out what other people look for in a movie—they may be people we know at work, or relatives, or the parents of our children’s friends—we learn about one another’s sensibilities and tastes. A movie is an event in the culture at large; this is far less frequently the case with a ballet performance or an art show or even a best-selling novel. The visual artists who reach out to movie culture by borrowing images or iconography or compositional strategies from Hollywood are trying to open up art-gallery art to the larger culture—an honorable objective. But the effect more often than not is to close down art-gallery art: the one-on-one experience of looking at a painting or a sculpture is diluted. The references to movie culture carry with them a freight of allusions that is difficult for the artist to control. You can’t see the pictures for the popcorn.

No contemporary artist is quite so saturated in movie culture as Cindy Sherman. She is a hit