Leo Steinberg (b.1920) from ‘Other Criteria’ published in March 1972 and was a breath of fresh air against the strict regime that swallowed the early 1970s. Steinberg distinctly mentions the changing view of art and the way that it is created for the onlooker. He specifies that art is transforming into something new and that the ‘Old Masters’ are the artists who lived within the realm of Renaissance painting and he perceives this type of art as ‘flat’.

The 1970s were still the years of change, in a political, social and cultural sense. Therefore this piece of text by Steinberg would have helped push the minds of the modern world alongside the ever-changing society that the artists of that time grew with.

Richard Serra (b.1939) from The Yale Lecture published in Amsterdam in 1990 and the lecture was in January of 1990 in the middle of a period where a lot of controversy surrounded him and one of his sculpture pieces. Serra refers to the people who helped him create his sculptures as his ‘new studio’ because he needed professionals who knew the industrial sector very well in order to create his pieces. Serra specifies during his lecture that his works “never decorate, illustrate or depict a site”, they become part of it – this is most possibly why he got into trouble with his sculpture as it was deconstructed and ripped down from where it had been displayed due to making the people in the area unhappy as it was not aesthetically pleasing enough.

The similarities between these two texts are that Steinberg and Serra discuss their work as being something that society is not yet used to, these artists aspired to change the way that art was created and perceived, but to also shock in the process.