The fact is, that both finish and impetuosity, specific minuteness and large abstraction, may be signs of passion, or of its reverse; may result from affection or indifference, intellect or dulness . . . . Now both the finish and incompletion are right where they are signs of passion or of thought, and both are wrong, and I think the finish the more contemptible of the two, where they cease to be so.
—John Ruskin, Modern Painters
The eruption of new stylistic initiatives in art, although anything but a novelty in the cultural history of the present century, can still be counted on to have a disconcerting effect on established taste. At times it may even inspire anger and resentment among the very people who pride themselves on being ready for anything in art—especially anything radical. Exactly why, at this late date, this should continue to be the case is, on the face of it, a little baffling.
Change, after all—incessant and insistent change—has been the rule in the life of art for as long as anyone can now remember. It was the basic principle that governed the development of art in the age of the avant-garde. And the velocity of change, far from slackening in recent generations, has, if anything, only accelerated. Certainly no other culture in the recorded history of civilization has been subjected to the kind of unremitting pressure of innovation in art that has long been a commonplace feature of ours.
Yet,
