The usual story of Modernist art: that it was smashed by Fascism and totalitarianism in prewar Europe, then triumphally restored in postwar America as the analogue of American Freedom. The recovery of Modernism in the form of ‘the Triumph of American Painting’ is interpreted as cultural compensation for the devastation of Europe. A strong version of this story, affirmed by Rubin at MoMA, was developed by Clement Greenberg, for whom advanced abstraction did not break with the artistic past but preserved its greatest qualities through self-critique.

Such ‘Modernist painting’ served, then, not only to bracket other avant-garde practices, which indeed posited a break with tradition (the readymade, constructed sculpture, the found image, collage, photomontage), but also to paper over historical rupture as such: in effect, this account concentrated history on one medium, abstract painting, which provided a sense of continuity not to be had elsewhere. This high culture narrative was counterposed to the deep ‘distaste for the cheap amusements and common spectacles that make up mass culture’, the corporate merging, culture marketing and the franchising (the Star Wars industry). It was distaste and hostility because culture is entertainment, and mass culture was deemed to be the realm of the inauthentic.

Today, when the divides between high and low culture, Modernist and mass art are disappearing, the split between Modernist art and contemporary practice widens every day at museums like the Guggenheim, Tate Modern, MoMA and the Pompidou. In 1929 there was no divide between Modernist and contemporary. Similarly in 1949. Not so in 2009 --- today it is clear that the Modernist and the contemporary have parted company. Thus the the large painterly photograph and the even larger projected image, both of which are often treated digitally, have become international idioms, and point to a paradox whereby, even as ‘the cinema’ is declared dead, ‘the cinematic’ now appears almost everywhere: in computer games and TV adverts, on building façades.

This form is taking place in the context of a far more penetrative register of media, market, and war and empire that we have come to naturalise as ‘globalisation’ than that of the early modernists in the first half of the 20th century. In this context the new culture and marketing is just another version of ‘the culture industry’ outlined by Adorno and Horkheimer more than fifty years ago? Culture and marketing of the Star Wars type is just another version of ‘the culture industry’ outlined by Adorno and Horkheimer more than fifty years ago.

One could identify three phases of this industry in the 20th century: the first in the 1920s as radio spread, sound was connected to film and mechanical reproduction became pervasive (Debord identified this as the formation of ‘spectacle’); the second in the postwar perfection of a consumer capitalism (with its image world luridly exposed by Warhol); and the third, perhaps, in the digital revolution and dot.capitalism of today.