Arts of Impoverishment

Why taunt and flout us, as Beckett's writing does? Why discourage us from seeing, as Mark Rothko's paintings often can? Why immobilize and daze us, as Alain Resnais' films sometimes will? Why, Leo Becrsani and Ulysse Dutoit ask, would three acknowledged masters of their media make work deliberately opaque and inhospitable to an audience? This book shows us how such crippling moves may signal a profoundly original-and profoundly antimodernist-renunciation of art's authority.