The '70s are gone, and where is their typical art? Nobody seems to know. Everyone still knows what the art of the '60s looked like. It looked like Claes Oldenburg's giant Mickey Mouse, like Andy Warhol's cans or Roy Lichtenstein's enlarged comic strips. Such pieces now have a period air of things meant to be consumed quickly—EAT ME! as the lettering on Alice's cake read. They constitute an art of rapid memorable icons that expected to be assimilated and exhausted in quick bursts, as indeed they were.
The art of the '70s had no such homogeneous "look." It was not a decade for movements. Movements belonged to the '60s: op, pop, color-field, minimalism and so on. By 1975 all the isms were wasms. The '70s were pluralistic; every kind of art suddenly found room to coexist. The idea of a "mainstream," beloved of formalist criticism in the '60s, vanished into the sand: "At last the Dodo said, 'Everybody has won, and all must have prizes.' " And although the decade produced its meed of good art, some very interesting indeed, the most striking thing to happen was agreement on a level below the art itself: that modernism, which had been the cultural bedrock of Europe and America for 100 years, was over, and in the course of becoming a period style. As Art Critic Hilton Kramer put it in a deservedly influential essay in 1972, we are at the end of "the Age of the Avant-Garde."
By 1979 the idea of the avant-garde had gone. This sudden metamorphosis of one of the popular clichés of art criticism into an unword took a great many people by surprise. For those who still believed that art had some practical revolutionary function, it was as baffling as the evaporation of the American radical left after 1970. But ideas exist for as long as people use them, and by 1976 "avant-garde" was a useless concept: social reality and actual behavior had rendered it obsolete. The ideal—social renewal by cultural challenge—had lasted 100 years, and its vanishing marked the end of an entire relationship, eagerly sought but not attained, of art to life.