Abstract painting and integrationist linguistics

Roy Harris offers artists and the artworld an opportunity to renew and reexamine abstraction and modernism, freeing them from the fallacy of significant form, confusion about intentionality and the redundancy that comes from art that merely illustrates theory and visual culture. The author contrasts a view of art over time (art history) with a view of art at a particular time (visual cultural), and suggests that the new supercategory of media foreseen by Harris (2010) may be paralleled by the development of a new supercategory of art that is difficult to imagine today. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.