Modernism, like the modernity, is a category of historical consciousness; a category of historical totalization of cultural experience. It is a periodizing category that designates a shift in the configuration of past, present, and future that gives “history” its content and character at a given moment. It is a category that marks a topographical shift. It is a way of slicing into the past.

In the 20th century modernism's conceptualization of art affirms art’s autonomy while denying its heteronomy. Modernism is a defensive reaction against the “confusions” of art and non-art, of art’s heteronomy, as it delineates the propriety and autonomy of particular arts. So we have a quiet policing of the frontiers of art and non-art.

The strength of modernism is that its proponents grasped what was at stake in the aesthetic regime of art in that they decided to intervene on behalf of securing a proper place of art, against a politicizing of art and the vicissitudes of the market. If the aesthetic regime of art operates through the constant transformation of the line between art and non-art, forms of life, and forms of art, then it is also of form of dissensus.

The association of Modernism with conservatism, high culture and the status quo was made in the 1960s and the judgment made by those on the left was that Modernism no longer speak to us. Art can no longer fulfill its promise. The rescue operation performed by Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (1970) did not begin properly until at least 1984, when the first English translation of the book was published by Routledge.

As Marjorie Perloff states in The Aura of Modernism in Modernist Cultures (Vol.1 no1.)

For Adorno, Modernist art is characterized by its resistance to capitalist commodification, a resistance characterized by its opposition to a society that it nevertheless brings back into the artwork by means of indirect critique. The true Modernist artwork, Adorno posits, refuses to engage in direct reflection of social surface; it does not “want to duplicate the façade of reality,” but “makes an uncompromising reprint of reality while at the same time avoiding being contaminated by it.” This dialectic process is characterized by Adorno as negative mimesis. Kafka’s work, for example, is great in its “negative sense of reality”; his image of bureaucracy is “the cryptogram of capitalism’s highly polished, glittering late phase, which he excludes in order to define it all the more precisely in its negative.”9 Accordingly, fragmentation, dislocation, and difficulty are essential to Modernist art, which rigidly excludes the banalities of everyday life and rejects the specious productions of mass culture.