Martin Amis's 1995 novel, The Information, about a failing writer, Richard Tull, and his improbably successful confrère, Gwyn Barry, slips such knowing observations between the lines of its determinedly dystopian narrative. Leaving aside the question of whether Melville's comment ruled him out as any kind of modernist, the claim that modernism offers pain, not pleasure – that what is difficult cannot be simply, instantly enjoyable – strikes a chord at a time when, as art critic Waldemar Januszczak has recently asserted, ‘art's main task … is to be popular. Whatever it takes, however it's done, it needs to get punters through the door. And that's it’. Reminding his readers that the likes of Michelangelo, Rembrandt and Van Gogh ‘made art for profound civilisational reasons. To memorialise, to imagine, to lament’, Januszczak declared that while ‘there is nothing wrong with popularity … the problems start when the artistic experience is distorted and cheapened to keep up visitor numbers’. Another art critic, T.J. Clark, writes in a not dissimilar vein that ‘seeing is difficult’ and, in a discussion of paintings by Frank Auerbach, concludes that ‘the picture, if it's any good, is obliged to discover the interdependence of its features; but it also ought to show us what a strange thing – a shock, a scandal, a leap into being, a “getting in the way” of our normal fabric of vision – this happening of totality really is’.

The idea that ‘totality’ as ‘interdependence’ – a classicising, integrative impulse – benefits from being offset by things that are strange and shocking seems designed to delineate Auerbach's modernistic essence, allusively estranging rather than photographically reproducing his favoured English locations.