Art as Music, Music as Poetry, Poetry as Art, from Whistler to Stravinsky and Beyond

In 1877, Ruskin accused Whistler of 'flinging a pot of paint in the public's face'. Was he right? After all, Whistler always denied that the true function of art was to represent anything. This title traces the history of the principle: how it created our very notion of 'great art', and why it declined as a vision from the 1960s.