Harry Levin opened his famous essay “What Was Modernism?” (1960) with his somewhat bewildered lament that a new apartment building in New York City had been named the Picasso. For Levin, this meant that modernism—understood as a revolt against the increasingly commercialized aesthetic sensibilities of the bourgeoisie—was now dead, commodified just like wallpaper and pop music. We have all had analogous moments. Years ago in Madrid, I saw a placard advertising Burger King's new salad menu; it read: “Verde que te quiero verde” (Green, how I want you green), the opening line of Federico García Lorca's surrealist masterpiece “Romance sonámbulo.” In such moments, the cognitive dissonance sometimes results from a shattering of our previous beliefs that the artist, poem, or movement in question was somehow pure—and thus, that capitalism's pernicious reach had tainted a more authentic artworld. But in many cases, what startles us is an incongruence: the widespread social...

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