“Philosophically speaking, experimental scores enabled a shift in investment from the static polish of a finished work to procedures and processes—often iterative, indeterminate, or chance-derived—in a way that vastly expanded and challenged what counted as a work of art. Artists and critics of the time perceived this process-based work as facilitating escape from the fashionable but dogmatic theory of modernism that had been forwarded by the eminent American art critic Clement Greenberg, whose theory valued the specialized autonomy of modernist abstraction against the threat of popular kitsch, and prized the rigorous separation of artistic mediums (painting, sculpture, etc.) from one another. In retrospect, we can see artists’ turn to scores in this moment as a major event that helped usher in the series of paradigm shifts later associated with the demise of Greenbergian modernism, a change that prepared the ground for more recently accepted ideas about the destabilized nature of both contemporary art (as idea and object) and the complex identity of artists in relation to their work.”