Contributed by Anne Swartz / Since its origins in the 1970s, practitioners and advocators of the Pattern and Decoration movement have countered claims that ‘decorative’ art lacked seriousness. In America at the time, critical arguments focused on the exhaustion of painting, positioning it as an outmoded visual form. Several artists resisted this affront. Instead, they embraced images for their pleasure, opposing the notion of immediacy often considered synonymous with other mediums such as photography.