The fear is that art criticism be merely promotional writing, the art critic just a servant of the art market, and that art criticism is more than mere journalist reporting. Art criticism should make a difference.One example is Clement Greenberg, who following the politically conservative Eliot, argued that radically original painting built upon, without breaking with, tradition.

Greenberg claimed that the Abstract Expressionists grew out of modernist tradition; the coloured field painters were the natural heirs of the Abstract expressionists. Art is continuity for Greenberg and so he argued that the history of modernist painting is inaugurated by Manet's preserving-and-breaking-with old master tradition.

Though Pollock's paintings look very different from cubist works, in Greenberg's historical narrative they deal with essentially the same concerns:

The painter's first task had been to hollow out an illusion of three-dimensional space on a flat surface... . Modernism has rendered this stage shallower and shallower until now its backdrop has become the same as its curtain.

Was there not a serious break or rupture in the 1960s? The name for the historical rupture is postmodernism. It is a rupture because the nature of art changes--eg., Warhol's Brillo Box. Claes Oldenberg's ray guns, Robert Morris's felt, and Ed Ruscha's photographs of city lots have become precious artifacts displayed in well-guarded museums.

Secondly, it is a rupture because the conventions defining art change with the times eg., through questioning the assumptions of modernism: the idea of art as self-expression, which lies behind biographical explanations; the belief in the unique artwork; the belief that an artist develops in a continuous way; and that painting has an unchanging essence amidst the constant flux.

That kind of questioning is the task of philosophy, or more accurately aesthetics.