BOREDOM

Without boredom, arguably there is no modernity: the current sense of the word emerged simultaneously with industrialization, mass p olitics, and consumerism. From Manet onward, when art represents the everyday within modern life, encounters with tedium are inevita ble. And from modernism's retreat into abstraction to subsequent demands placed on audiences from the late 1960s to the present, the viewer's endurance of repetition, slowness, or other forms of monotony has become an anticipated feature of gallery-going.