Behind the Times: The Decline and Fall of the Twentieth-Century Avant Gardes

Abstract

Does modern art express the times or is it a series of wilful aberrations? Do we have any way of judging its success or failures? This text argues that unlike writers and composers, who have come to terms with mass-production and the technology of infinite repetition, painters still cling to the unique art-object, the product of the artist's own hands. The result is a succession of attempts to find relevance and meaning that are doomed to failure. This thesis contributes to a dilemma of our time, and would interest artists and critics alike.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 17 citations exist upstream.