The stop-motion photography that fed through Eadweard Muybridge and the zoetrope then wove into the digitized simulcast of the visible world that floats off-planet, tethered by fibre-optic cabling, found its truest subject matter in the motion-stop of the successive waves of troops going over the top of First World War trenches. As Paul Fussell so persuasively argues in ‘The Great War and Modern Memory’, after the optimistic leave-taking bogged down in the Gotterdammerung of entrenched warfare, the mode of all art pertained towards irony; but within this, figurative painting became much more ironic, and dramatically so. The young and perfect bodies jerking and ticking on the barbed wire as the bullets rhythmically struck them were, of course, only an extreme and specialized form of the mechanised torture imposed on the human form by compulsive industrialisation – that much was understood.

- from will self's believing in the cow in New Museum's George Condo catalog.