Modern art emerged from real historical shocks, not arbitrary taste shifts

Hughes's organizing claim is that each major rupture in modern art responds to a specific, identifiable disruption in lived experience — industrial machinery, urban expansion, mechanized warfare, new physics — rather than arising from artists simply wanting to be different for its own sake. The 'shock of the new' in his title refers as much to the shock artists themselves absorbed from a changing world as to the shock later delivered to audiences.

He insists that treating avant-garde movements as a sequence of formal innovations, detached from their historical triggers, strips them of their actual meaning and makes them look arbitrary or self-indulgent, feeding the common suspicion that modern art is essentially a con. Context, in his account, isn't background — it's the engine.

This framing lets him defend even movements that provoke ridicule, like early abstraction, by showing the specific problem of representation each was trying to solve given what the world had just become. Modern art wasn't inventing shock for its own sake — it was metabolizing shocks the century had already delivered.