ABSTRACT
The history of aesthetic modernism has often been written as the triumph of form over content, the apotheosis of self-referentiality over the representation or expression of anything external to the artwork. The critical discourse accompanying modernism has likewise been preoccupied with formal issues, whether approvingly, as in the case of writers like Roger Fry, Clive Bell, and the Russian Formalists, as in that of most Marxist critics. Modernity has sometimes seemed coterminous with the very differentiation of form from content, indeed even the fetishization of self-sufficient form as the privileged locus of meaning and value. Modernism can be interpreted as the hypertrophy of form in many or all of its senses, there has been from the beginning a counterimpulse within modern art that has resisted it, a refusal to countenance the differentiation and purification characteristic of modernist aesthetics in general. A more historically specific approach might usefully draw on Peter Burger's well-known distinction between modernism and the avant-garde.
