Modernist Theory and Modernist Art

Modernist Theory and Modernist Art

It is extremely difficult to critique a movement in art that has passed, one that is theoretically over.

However, as Clement Greenberg says in closing his essay “Modernist Painting”;

“Most of the things that get written about contemporary art belong to journalism rather than criticism properly speaking. It belongs to journalism – and to the millennial complex from which so many journalists suffer in our day – that each new phase of Modernism should be hailed as the start of a whole new epoch of art making a decisive break with all the customs and conventions of the past. Each time a kind of art is expected that will be so unlike previous kinds of art and so 'liberated' from norms of practice or taste, that everybody, regardless of how informed or uninformed, will be able to have his say about it. And each time this expectation is disappointed, as the phase of Modernism in question take its place, finally, in the intelligible c...