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So it is with modernism, only more so, because we are much closer to it. Its reflexes still jerk, the severed limbs twitch; the parts are still there, but they no longer connect or function as a live whole. The modernist achievement will continue to affect culture for another century at least, because it was large, so imposing and so irrefutably convincing. But its dynamic is gone, and our relationship to it is becoming archaeological. Picasso is no longer a contemporary, or a father figure; he is a remote ancestor, who can inspire admiration but not opposition. The age of the New, like that of Pericles, has entered history. — By Robert Hughes Drawn from his newly published book The Shock of the New (Knopf; $29.95).