ABSTRACT
T. S. Eliot's “Tradition and the Individual Talent” famously presents impersonality as a fundamental feature of good writing. It suggests that the true poet is engaged in a continual surrender of himself to the literary tradition, and is a depersonalized medium through which that tradition passes in order to be elaborated and perpetuated. Peter Osborne defines modernism as the project of the production of the qualitatively new in art or, more precisely, the production of an art appropriate to the qualitative novelty of the historical present itself. He has recently written that institutional critique in the visual arts, meaning the trend of sustained inquiry into the workings of art institutions, serves to support the critical value of the art institution, the political conditions and social impotence of which it simultaneously exposes, because acceptance of critique within the institution negates the practical function of that critique, although not its intellectual value.
