We live now amidst the ruins of a civilization, but most of these ruins are in our minds.
—John Lukacs, The Passing of the Modern Age

We do not nowadays refute our predecessors, we pleasantly bid them good-bye.
—George Santayana, Character and Opinion in the United States

Nothing has been more remarkable in the cultural life of the past decade than the speed with which the imperatives of the modern movement have been stripped of their authority. Twenty years ago it was rank heresy to suggest that modernism might already have entered upon its decline. The assumption was that the modernist spirit was not to be construed as a period phenomenon, but as a permanent and irreversible condition of cultural life. Ten years ago it was still controversial, though no longer unthinkable, to claim that a decisive break had already occurred. Defections from modernist orthodoxy were too widespread to be discounted, yet there was a distinct reluctance to explore—or even, indeed, to acknowledge—their implications. Today, however, it is suddenly chic to speak of a “postmodernist” art, and scandal no longer attaches to the idea that modernism has run its course. Even the stoutest defenders of the old absolutes concede that something has happened.

It was to be expected, of course, that modernism would be significantly modified once its tenets came to dominate the culture it had long sought to topple and displace. Modernism was born, after all, in a spirit of criticism and revolt. It was