Clement Greenberg's enormously influential definition of modernism embodies a teleological approach to art that was rejected by the Pop artists, among others, who constituted part of the reaction to 'modernism' (or, at least, to Greenberg's modernism) that began in the 1960s. Greenberg made an initial distinction between art, which took in "advanced painting," and kitsch, the German word for "disposable, poorly-designed consumer objects" that had been flooding the world in the wake of the Industrial Revolution (Stiles 2). Such objects fed the popular taste for illusionist representation, sentiment, anecdote, and decoration that was, Greenberg believed, beneath consideration for true art. In his view the European avant-gardes of the pre-1940 era embodied this disdain for the popular and a concern with the higher purposes of art. Greenberg's theory of modernism developed as an explanation of the trend that he believed he saw in those avant-gardes. He saw the increasing abstraction of the schools of twentieth-century art as a continuum on which the next, and more advanced, school of painting would move to greater abstraction and tried to explain this seeming forward movement in painting as somehow being inherent in art itself. In his view each movement embodied a more radical critique of painting within itself and each artistic medium became increasingly "self-referential, divested of all extraneous elements including narrative and illusion" and would, thereby, eventually be "able to move from abstraction to universal essence" (Stiles 2). Thus, in his view, painting (or any art) has a meaningful dimension only insofar as it is transcendent, i.e., headed toward this ultimate expression of, or achievement of, universal essence.
His view of advanced painting, therefore, was that it "progressed from greater to lesser complexity" and, despite what Stiles calls "the poverty of his version of modernism," this view of art was not only...