Modern Art

I'm reading Visual Shock, subtitled A history of art controversies in American culture, by Michael Kammen. On page 88 the author quotes William Hubbard's generalization about modernism and art.

Like architecture, art before modernism spoke of human affairs. When one encountered a work of art, one would encounter (in addition to the play of shape and light) some puzzle of human conduct: What is happening in this scene? What would I do and think and feel if I were there? And what does that say about the way I live in the hear and now?

But moderns set themselves a different task. They wanted artworks that would not be above things in the world but would themselves be things in the world. They did not want to create scenes and shapes that reminded us of places and things we had previously encountered in the world; they wanted to present us with scenes and shapes wholly unlike any we had ever encountered, so that we could contemplate the invented qualities of those new works--shapes never before experienced, configurations of color and light never before seen. 

The original citation is William Hubbard, "A Meaning for Monuments," in The public Face of Architecture: Civic Culture and Public Spaces (New York, 1987), 132-33.