The Two Camps of Modern Art Is about the Two Main Schools of Thought in Art History from 1945 - Current

After six years of horror were brought to a close by the atomic bomb, (I am speaking of course of WWII) the new situation in society and the world required a profound change in art, which discarded traditional rules and provided the expected distinction between techniques of expression almost meaningless. From this point on it is no longer possible to speak of "painting": a different horizon opens, one that the masterpieces anticipated but which new artists are now tackling, in unpredictable ways; Modern Art. There is an analogy to the history of art. Modernism in art marks a point before which painters set about representing the world the way it presented itself, painting people and landscapes and historical events just as they would present themselves to the eye. With modernism, the conditions of representation themselves become central, so that art in a way becomes its own subject. This was almost precisely the way in which Clement Greenberg defined the matter in his famous 1960 essay "Modernist Painting." "The essence of Modernism," he wrote, "lies, as I see it, in the use of the characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it but in order to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence." Interestingly, Greenberg took as his model of modernist thought the philosopher Immanuel Kant: "Because he was the first to criticize the means itself of criticism, I conceive of Kant as the first real Modernist." …