Modern art. I used to know what those words meant. Modern art began with Manet and the discovery of flatness as a value in painting. It reached a new clarity of purpose with Cézanne and exploded into full existence in Picasso's 1907 painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon... or, if I remember The Shock of the New, it began with the Eiffel Tower and the motor car ...
I am talking, of course, about modernism – the art movement, or constellation of art movements, that is widely held to have ended in the 1960s. When I was a student, the fashionable term for what came afterwards was postmodernism. That fell with The Late Show. And now? Well, we all say "modern art" and mean anything from Duchamp to Ryan Gander.
When I realised a few years ago that people no longer had any reference to the history of modernism in mind when they said "modern art", I was shocked. I blamed it on Tate Modern for adopting such a grand name and then filling its opening displays with the brashly new back in the early noughties. But since then it has become clear that modern art, in its current sense of the art of today and its direct antecedents, is here to stay. It's understandable when we are so obviously living in modern times, in a world hurtling towards a new future every day. This is tomorrow. If modernism dreamt of a utopia, it's here.
But, when I personally say "a great modern artist", I still probably mean an artist who worked before 1960. We may have modern art, but modernism (RIP) still sets the bar higher than most of our own moderns dream of.
And this is the problem that dogs the art critic in the 21st century. Our glibly high evaluation of today's art, casually calling it "modern art" as if it could ride roughshod over the achievements of the last century, and we could cherry pick modernism's history to find phoney lineages for whatever we want to plug, is a massive lie. The arts in the period between 1880 and 1920 reached heights of achievement unseen since the Renaissance. The avant garde in its prime was all greatness, all glory. With the best will in the world, and however much we find to admire and to hope for, our time is mannerist in comparison. Modern art? I wish it would come back.