Although the arts would appear to be an area that allows freedom of expression to participants and that has no overall authority dictating what individuals can or cannot do, it is surprising how set in its ways and resistant to change it can become at the professional and institutional level. While amateurs are more or less free to do what they want, things change when one moves on to that other level. There, styles and methods can take on an air of authority that can be very restrictive to those with unconventional ideas, as often happened in traditional arts teaching, with certain styles being considered to stand as models. Modernism in its early phase represented a concerted rejection of aesthetic authority, challenging preconceptions and breaking conventions across all the arts and the traditions that they represented, but it soon became restrictive in its turn, laying down principles of what could count as meaningful artistic practice through its control over many of the artworld's key institutions; either you followed the modernist line or you were damned as reactionary by its leading figures and your work denigrated. While postmodernism represented a rejection of the modernist creed and its obsession with originality, it too came to be a restrictive aesthetic in time, judging all artistic activity according to its own fairly rigid set of principles. Each style had a method that it deemed to be authoritative, leading it to be critical of work which did not conform to this. In effect, dissent was yet again being outlawed; there was a new grand narrative and to diverge from it was to take a risk with your professional reputation. Popularity with the public would not be enough to change the minds of your peers either; in fact, many modernists viewed popularity with something like disdain, as if it meant there was a lack of seriousness in the work of anyone who achieved such acclaim. It was as if artworks had to be difficult to understand to qualify as authentic. Postmodernists may have made far more of an effort to win public favour, but they had their own notions of what constituted authenticity and these could be just as exclusive in their way.