ABSTRACT
A concept of art history remains an essential precondition for a market in art to come in to existence. Georgio Vasari is rightly referred to as the Father of Art History because his Lives of the Artists was the first work to set forth an historical re-telling of the production of over two centuries of what we might call the Italian Renaissance. Newspapers and their art critics would provide the same highly anticipated commentary to the exhibitions that a sports writer gave to an important athletic competition. The art press, as a term, relates primarily to journals devoted solely to writing on visual arts. Most art movements have their defining critic. Abstract-Expressionism has it in Clement Greenberg. In this way Greenberg lays an end goal for Modernism as the drive toward total non-objectivity, which he saw as the most advanced form of art.
