In the April 2006 edition of Quadrant, Giles Auty denounced modern art’s “obsession with novelty” and stated a position that seems relatively unexceptional: that the single feature that unifies the forty-odd art movements of the twentieth century that constitute modernism is “the rejection of past ideas and practices”. For Auty, as for many, “if such a rejection is absent we are not really talking about modernism. For a modernist label to apply, the break with past practice has to be total.” Almost by definition, modernism has always been conscious of its place in time. Naturally enough, it has also had…