view that there is a teleology of art--that art can help human beings find meaning in life, and that there is such deeper, objective meaning, however abstractly expressed. As Pollock himself says with respect to the uniqueness of his art and its relation to purpose and meaning, "The strangeness will wear off and I think we will discover the deeper meanings in modern art" (Stiles and Selz 22). This paper will argue that the anti-modernists, or post-modernists, or at least many of them, would scoff at such claims at "deeper meanings" in art or even, perhaps, in life, at least insofar as those meanings are discernible by humankind. Certainly the selected work by Rainer does not take seriously the notion that such "deeper meanings" are accessible through art.
Greenberg did not see the abstraction of modernist art as a sign of alienation from the classical belief that there were indeed objective mea
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