Introduction

By 1967 the major sixties isms, namely pop art; stained-color-field abstraction, or formalism; and minimalism, had become established in the art world. Their rationales had become familiar, too familiar for them to be thought of as avant-garde. Pop art had been the most notorious of sixties movements up to the end of 1963. After that it no longer generated much art-world discourse. Pop art's innovators, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, and Tom Wesselmann, continued to command attention. Formalist and minimal ideologies continued to dominate art criticism well into the 1970s, the disagreements between them notwithstanding. The aesthetics of Greenberg, the most important art critic to emerge since World War II, were the fount of both formalist and minimal discourse. Greenberg derived his conception of quality from Immanuel Kant's claim that the aesthetic realm is autonomous, transcending social and moral considerations.