"Is modernism over?" That is the question that Mia Fineman poses to Peter Gay in the opening salvo of their exchange about Gay's new book, Modernism, at Slate.

Fineman, a New York-based curator, takes issue with Gay's contention that the emergence of Pop Art in the 1960s killed modernism by blurring the line between high and low culture. Or, as Gay puts it, the Pop Art movement "transgressed the time-honored boundaries between serious and playful art."

Fineman is not convinced. "Modernism was never about upholding a categorical separation between high and low culture," Fineman writes. "From the beginning, Modernists emphatically embraced the forms and language of popular culture as vital aspects of the experience of modern life."

Fineman's critique echoes that of Richard Pells in his recent appraisal of Gay's new book in The Chronicle Review. Pells argues that the European modernists were not trying to maintain the barriers between high and low culture.  "On the contrary," Pells writes, "they were fascinated with popular culture, which is why they were entranced with America. From the early 20th century, modernist artists incorporated elements of America's mass culture into their works."

"The Pop artists were not so much abandoning modernism as amplifying its irreverence," Pells adds.

In his response to Fineman, Gay concedes that the impact of the Pop Art movement is perhaps open to a range of interpretations and that, in some respects, he hopes he is wrong. "I find my concerns about that period as a possible end to Modernism, though not assured at all, fairly probable," Gay writes. "That said, I do not feel dogmatic about the 'end of art.'"

"You may note that I put a question mark after the title of my last chapter, "Life After Death?" because as a historian I do not find predictions my specialty and I do not know if Modernism can survive," Gay writes to Fineman. "If it can in this democratic age, all the better. In any event, this question mark was deliberate and the result of some thinking on my part. If I am wrong, as I said, I will be delighted."