Essentially, Modern Art allowed the "culturati" to move even further apart from the rest of society-they could be even more unique than before because they actually liked this stuff that was strange and pointless to try to understand if you didn't know the theories it was being painted behind.
As Wolfe explains, however, it isn't just the "culturati" that cause this great influence on art theory. Art critics all over the United States want, as always, to fit in with the chic of the chic and to be able to control what fashions are the craze. It is, after all, their critiques which usually control the flow of the fashion. Modern Art's foremost critical influences in the United States, as Wolfe presents in The Painted Word, are Greenberg, Rosenberg, and later, Steinberg.
Greenberg believed that art was heading into a final destination of "purity", and that the final destination of all that is truly art is what he called "Flatness" (Wolfe 49). Essentially what this meant was that because the painting is indeed a flat surface made to appear like a three dimensional plane by the painter, most painting was illusion. They began to conclude that the two-dimensionality of the canvas plane was what was important, not the illusion they could create on it. Greenberg seemed intense on the point of flatness-as Wolfe puts it, it became "an obsession, one might say" (50). The purity of flatness essentially came down to a style in which lines, forms, colors, and contours all are merged eloquently in such a unification with the flatness of the canvas that it is art, as pure as art can be. Until 1950 or so, most of the basic art theories originated with the ideas of Greenberg and the purity of flatness.
Out of the woodwork comes Rosenberg, who basically "came up with a higher synthesis" which more or less combined Greenberg's ideas-which seem almost chaining in their pureness-with the idea that without shattering the flatness or purity of the painting, the painter can express all the emotions he means to portray in the way he paints as opposed to line and form.