This was, of course, opposed by proponents of the canon, pre-eminently Clement Greenberg. Greenberg published his es- say Towards a Newer Laocoon in 1940, twelve years before Cage’s concert. In it he wrote, “There has been, is, and will be, such a thing as a confusion of the arts.” He argues that, in each era, there can be, and has been, a dominant art, one all the others tend to imitate to their own detriment, perversion, and loss of integrity. From the early 17th century to the last third of the 19th, he says that the dominant art was literature. What.
