Minimalism, which was arguably the first artistic movement to achieve international importance that was created and developed by American artists, had the fundamentally Modernist goal of reducing painting and sculpture to its essentials - stripping away the surface ornamentation of fashionableness and style to reveal the artist's core principles. To this end, Minimalist artists (even more so than Modernists) avoided representational elements in their work: They were not interested in creating an image that could be "read" through conventional imagery. This was the antithesis of the grand and flattering portraits that earlier artists had created of their patrons.

Minimalist artists in general veered toward sculpture rather than painting, taking advantage of new materials just then being developed (many Minimalist works incorporated new forms of plastic). Artists like Robert Morris and Donald Judd also seemed to believe that it was more easily possible to create entirely new means of expression once they broke away from the flat space of the canvas with its history of representation.

A number of critics saw the extreme rejection of the representational not as a continuation of the tenets of Modernism but as a refutation of them. Mich'l Fried, i

By making these connections between Pop Art and its artistic roots, we can make a good argument that it is not merely kitsch. We must look to Duchamp as a predecessor of Lichtenstein and Pop Art because Duchamp redefined who counted as an artist. And by doing this Duchamp also redefined what counted as art - and how art could be made. Beginning with Duchamp, every artist who came after him has had as a part of his or her conceptual bag of tricks the chance to use readymade objects in his or her work.

But while artists like Duchamp used physical objects that they picked up to make art with, it would be artists like Donald Judd to transform the literal use of readymades into a more conceptual use of them. Readymades were originally incorporated into art in part to shock the sensibilities of those in the artworld but also in part to protest what was happening in the world at large - the degradation of the lives of the common worker by industrialization, the rise of fascism, the love affair with the machine. Pop Art spun off of these same objections, but while Pop Artists were to some extent protesting what they saw in the world around them, they were also more content to mock what they saw whether than to try to change things, as Warhol (p. 340) suggests.

Warhol, Andy. "Warhol in His Own Words: Untitled Statements," from Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook for Atists' Writing, eds. Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz. Berkeley: UC Press, 1996.

However, this rather lofty tone cannot be reconciled with Modernism. Modernism was an essentially populist movement, pushing art into the