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The art of our time, we often hear, is undergoing a period of crisis of a magnitude greater than ever before. For over half a century many artists simultaneously have felt that art has to break with its past and remake itself anew, and yet have been at a loss regarding the direction in which to take it. Or, when artists have chosen a direction and announced that art is at last on the right track, this judgment has proven to be premature. The problem is epitomized by the plight of the later Bauhaus movement. On the one hand, its followers felt the continuing need for a direction, for an ideology; on the other hand, they also felt that the Utopian idealism that had so inspired its founders is not what art is all about. Artists themselves have been uncertain about what art is, and this has given a unique face to the history of art in our time; our century has witnessed the rapid turnover of movements, the rise of the importance of manifestos, the periodic ransacking of the past in search of themes and styles, and the feeling that art is a frontier that has to be continually pushed forward. Rosenberg speaks of this as the age of the "de-definition of art,' and of the modern art work as an "anxious object,' for it does not know whether it is a work of art or not.¹ Greenberg writes of the "crisis of the easel painting,'² others of crises in music and architecture.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-009-2805-3_10

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