Modernism in the Work of Art

Abstract

Mukarovsky, in 1934,2 saw among the pitfalls awaiting the art theorist with no grasp of semiology, ‘the temptation to treat the work of art as a purely formal construction’. Today, nevertheless, the tendency to apply semiotic theory to visual art in the direction of a ‘poetics’ has flowed into an easy confluence with the existing mainstream of ‘Modernist’ criticism, focused on the internal life of the autonomous object. Mukarovsky’s requirement that theory should ‘grasp the development of art as an immanent movement which also has a constant dialectical relation to the development of the other domains of culture’, remains unfulfilled.