Even accepting the common view that art's history goes beyond hundreds of years, it is possible to see that the 'langugage' of the art of the west has been painting and sculpture for some time. Up until the very recent past it has been assumed that if one wanted to speak as an artist he had to speak in the correct 'language'. That's how we knew he was an artist and what he made was art or meant to be art. Whatever was done, it had to be done within that language…in the past few years artists have realised that their traditional language is exhausted and unreal. (Kosuth, 1991:43)

no inclination to address the fundamental qualities of what makes language in the traditional sense a distinctive mode of communication and whether these distinctive properties bear any convincing relationship to those of painting and sculpture (Harris, 2003: 130).

a work of art is no longer visually distinct from a non-art object… our contemporary concept of 'art' no longer bears any direct or necessary relation to any objective characteristics, any aesthetic qualities, artistic techniques or any kind of object per se'. (Vickery, 2002)

What in the end makes the difference between a Brillo Box and a work of art consisting of a Brillo Box is a certain theory of art. It is the theory that takes it up into the world of art, and keeps it from collapsing into the real object which it is (in a sense of is other than that of artistic identification). Of course, without the theory, one is unlikely to see it as art, and in order to see it as part of the artworld, one must have mastered a good deal of artistic theory as well as a considerable amount of the history of recent New York painting. (Danto, 1964: 581)

early Greeenberg was exciting it was dynamic it was tackling something and so was the art and they were in parallel and then there were these coincidences and crossovers and I am quite sure quite a lot of artists began to talk the talk of Greenberg because he was a power in the land but I don't think they made their work in a Greenbergian way but they could discuss it in a Greenbergian way, and the minute they started to was the minute it started to go wrong and the writing and the art became academic. Or perhaps that's not the best word but it became the poorer the meaner the more instrumental, the writing became instrumental it served the art and the art served the writing and that is not healthy.

a denegration of the idea that craft skills, a visual sense and visual intelligence was disparaged and that society should have recognised those skills and not have been ashamed of them and require that they be justified by a more academic aspect which is quite, logically where theory comes in'.

”new” insofar as it identifies a turn taken by a number of important contemporary thinkers towards the idea that focussing on the specifically aesthetic impact of a work of art or literature has the potential to open radically different ways of thinking about identity, politics and culture'.

the appearance of a new aestheticism at a moment that is often termed 'post-theoretical' is a direct index of the extent to which, as 'theory' now enters a more reflective phase, there is an increased willingness among critics and philosophers to consider the ways in which literary and cultural theory often overlooked key aspects of its reliance on philosophical aesthetics.'