In early XX century, change was most obvious in the arts. For three or four centuries, since the age of humanism, Europeans had believed that the arts expressed aspirations, insights and pleasures accesible in principle to ordinary men, even though they might be raised to an exceptional degree of fineness in execution, or be especially concentrated in form so that not all individual men would always enjoy them. At any rate, it was possible for the whole of that time to retain the notion of the cultivated man who, given time and study, oculd discriminate with taste among the arts of his time because they were expressions of a shared culture with shared standards. This idea was first weakened when the XIX century, in the wake of the romantic movement, came to idealize the artist as genius – Beethoven was one of the first examples – and formulated the notion of the avant-garde. By the first decade of the XX century, further developments had occured which made it very difficult for trained eyes and ears to recognize art in much of what was done by the contemporary artists. The best symbol of this was the dislocation of the image in painting. Here, the flight from the representational still kept a tenuous link with tradition as late as Cubism, but by then it had long ceased to be apparent to the average "cultivated man" — if he still existed. Artists retired into a less and less accessible chaos of private visions, whose centre was reached in the world of Dada and Surrealism. The years after 1918 are of the greatest interest as something of a culmination of disintegration; in Surrealism even the notion of the objective disappeared, let alone its representation. As one Surrealist put it, the movement meant "thought dictated in the absence of all control exerted by reason, and outside all aesthetic or moral preoccupations". Through chance, symbolism, shock, suggestion and violence the Surrealists sought to go beyond consciousness itself.
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