Abstract

As a criterion for judging avant-garde art, newness has been regarded as more important than excellence. kermode's single venture into art criticism, "objects, jokes & art," suggests this search for the new has led to a trivialisation of art. ideas from his more recent literary criticism such as "the classic" could be applied to avant-garde art, providing a non-reactionary means of assessing value on the basis of a work's openness to a plurality of interpretations. this would offer an alternative reading of the history of modern art, opposed to formalist and reductionist views of the modernist continuum