. . . Here Andrea dal Castagno learned the art and taught it to other masters, among whom it was amplified and went on gaining in importance until the time of Pietro Perugino, of Leonardo da Vinci, and of Raffiello da Urbino, so much so that it has now attained to that beauty which thanks to these masters our artists have achieved.
—Vasari

You must worship vulgarity. You must shun form. You must never draw. You must reject harmonious color. You must paint crudely, preferably in a demonic frenzy. You must offend all people all the time. You must hail Tragedy everywhere, in everyone, always. You must vanquish Beauty. You must theorize about art. Your work must be socially significant. These are only ten of the newly clichéd ideas evident in much, though by no means all, painting, art criticism, and curatorship of recent decades, allegedly reflecting the world we live in. Inspired elements in them may once have served, still serve, a worthy purpose: they are postulated against equally rigid antitheses. They touch on changing concepts with a long past—ideas of the rude, crude, and awesome— which art perennially engages. But much of the current revolutionary thinking on art appears to be in deep freeze. William Blake predicted this in his poems about Orc, the archetype of the despotic mind. As the Frye and Erdman-Bloom readings would seem to suggest, and the poems themselves show, Orc, who began his career as a rebel, became politically correct