Alfred Barr’s infamous 1936 chart of Artistic Development

ARTICLE: When Modern and Contemporary Art Broke Up

There’s nothing new under the sun. The Boston Manifesto, a statement from concerned members of that city’s Institute of Contemporary Art in 1948, provided an accurate prophecy of the bubble of exclusion, irrelevance and big money hypocrisy that today’s establishment art world encourages:
“Modern art, the manifesto declared, had become ‘a cult of bewilderment’; the gap between critics and artists and the public had produced ‘a…playground for double-talk, opportunism, and chicanery at the public expense.’ Modern art had ‘come to signify for millions something unintelligible, even meaningless…'”

The writers later backed off from some of their sentiments-not because they were wrong, but because they prioritized staying in ideological lockstep with their fellow travelers. The educated class bought completely into  the utopian delusion that the slate of society needed to be wiped clean to bring about heaven on earth-their version of…