This is why the story of art tends to be dialectical. Instead of slow, incremental changes to methods and concepts, art movements quickly swing from one extreme position to another. The social realist school of painting promoted the idea that art should work to support revolutionary politics. The next generation, the abstract expressionists, demolished the social realist approach by refusing to use representational forms that could be used for propaganda. Then the pop artists rejected the abstract expressionists’ purism by adding elements of commercial kitsch to the canvas. A decade later,
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