Is modernism dead?

Modernists have pushed boundaries for over a century but is their defiant spirit still alive today?

One of the last living modernists? ... Frank Gehry. Photograph: Nick Ut/AP

Is modernism dead or alive? Can we still hope for iconoclasts who will boldly attack the conventions in whatever field they work - whether it's painting and poetry, architecture and design, novels and drama? Modernists have had their time for more than a century, ever since poets like Baudelaire and novelists like Flaubert outraged their contemporaries with candour and the inventive imagination.

From the very start, sinful questions posed by modernists weren't confined only to obscenity and irreverence, the most sensitive subjects of the time; they were also technical questions - what is a painting, a poem, a building? When the impressionists first exhibited in the late 1860s, art lovers who took their taste from the more conventional canvases featured in the Salons complained bitterly - weren't these "innovators" just presenting unfinished pictures, sketches that lacked the finished quality that any self-respecting painter always included in their works? Is their impulse for individuality, their desire to upset and overturn the prescriptions of accepted rules, still alive today?

I've spent six years (and it could have been more) writing a book about modernism, and I still don't feel able to offer a final judgment. As a historian and not a prophet, my job is with the past, not the future - but it would be disingenuous not to reveal my best guess.

To put it a little too simply, I'd say that modernism - Picasso's playfully distorted portraits of his women, Kafka's impossible stories told in the calmest prose, Beckett's incomprehensible and un-dramatic dramas - has opened up the richest imaginative possibilities that nonetheless cannot continue unabashed without running up to certain boundaries. Modernists, after all, defied the rules in the most extreme ways.

When John Cage put on the programme of a piano recital of his composition 4'33", and had a pianist sit down before a grand, carefully time his presence, then get up and leave without touching a key, he achieved an apex of modernist music that no one could surpass. So it seems modernists themselves have been the ones to put their exhilarating inventions to death.

But there's more: though modernism counted in its ranks some articulate democrats, it was far from a democratic movement. Whatever their specialty, modernists believed their "reforms" could only be grasped and enjoyed by an elite of privileged art lovers. Then came the early 60s and the immense and unexpected success of pop art, a painting style devoted to erasing the boundaries between high and low art. I found some pop art (and I don't mean the paintings of Andy Warhol) extraordinarily funny, but it was also a serious challenge to modernism. In sculpting hamburgers, or reproducing (in their own way) scenes from comics, pop art producers tried to blend the difference between art and illustration - in their work, "high" and "low" became meaningless classifications. This attack on the fundamental distinction by which modernists lived was as much of a death blow as some modernists' own extremism.

And yet, and yet... I still can't predict, with any real confidence, that the future of modernism has been definitively blocked by the 60s. Take, for example, two living artists, the novelist Gabriel García Márquez and the architect Frank Gehry. Within the last half-century, they have found new ways of defining their areas of expertise, ways that suggest that in a few minds at least, modernism is alive and well. I can only hope there will continue to be unforeseeable departures. Even if that's not to be, modernism has been making people uneasy for more than a century - we have every right now to enjoy it, even if only in retrospect.