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utter freedom. Manet himself, in particular, combinined these varied refer–
ences in extraordinary new conflations. Themes drawn from modern life,
including the painter's studio, replaced the Academy's high-minded
mythological and historical subject matter; eventually, the mere fact of see–
ing-and later of feeling-came to replace explicit narrative entirely.
Artists increasingly paid attention to non-western art and to the vernacu–
lar as sources-those Japanese woodblocks and Epinal prints mentioned
earlier. Later, African and Oceanic sculpture, catalogue illustrations, news–
papers, advertising art, and a host of other things deliberately chosen for
their lack of High Art associations were used both as sources of images and
as material inclusions. Witness Brancusi's synthesis of Romanian peasant
carving, African, and Khmer sculpture; the Cubists' newspaper collages;
Picasso and Gonzalez's sculptures constructed with the same materials and
methods used to make automobiles; and-closer to the present-the Pop
artists' assimilation of the subject matter and formal language of advertis–
ing art. That inclusiveness eventually extended to the unseen, to an interior
landscape of dream images and wordless, inchoate emotion.
Much of what I have been itemizing has its equivalent in a good deal
of the art of 1996. Images from the past, from a dazzling variety of world–
wide cultures, and from what used to be dismissed as kitsch, the emblems
of popular culture, are commonplace in current work, freely-at times, it
seems, randomly-chosen and even more freely recombined. Methods and
materials associated with industry, handicraft, mass entertainment, the ver–
nacular, and the sheerly expedient are routinely made the stuff of present
day art, along with self-reference, layering of allusions, and deliberate trans–
gression of accepted norms. All of these have their roots in modernism,
even in the art of 1896, but there are important differences. The most obvi–
ous, of course, is the absence of a true avant-garde. Far-outness is highly
valued in contemporary art. It is hardly news to observe that in 1996, out–
rageousness is received as warmly as academic virtuosity was in 1896, and
similarly goes a long way to ensuring a successful career. This has encour–
aged aspiring artists to aim, quite consciously, at novelty for the sake of
novelty, not at the intensity or resonance or excellence or power or what–
ever you wish to call it that their predecessors-reluctant innovators,
all-aspired to. Of course, the whole notion of excellence, which declares
one work of art to be superior to another, is itself deeply suspect in 1996,
so that it may be wholly inappropriate to suggest that excellence might be
considered a worthy goal.
There are other striking differences, mainly differences of attitude,
manifest in present day art, which are so acute that they have given rise to
the convenient notion of post-modernism. Whether post-modernism is
simply a sub-species of modernism can still be argued, but what is unde–
niable is that a deep pessimism and a new and pervasive sense of irony, of
