Thomas Crow, faced with the question of the supposed antithetical relations between avant-garde art and modern mass culture, demonstrates that the ties between the two have always been very strong and even necessary. For this, various and varied examples of the continuous interdependence between these two phenomena, from the Paris of the mid-19th century to the most recent revivals of conceptual art in the 1990s, passing through figures of the stature of Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol. From all this results a new and fresh type of cultural theory, no longer imposed by artists from outside, but made from within artistic practice.