The shock of the new
Who first used the expression 'the shock of the new'?
[It was the title of a television series tracing the history of modern art, developed for PBS in 1980 by Robert Hughes and others. Hughes, the art critic for Time magazine, expanded his contribution to the series into a well received book published in 1981 under the same title. That book remains a standard popular history of the subject. The phrase may have been used earlier by Harold Rosenberg - or indeed by anyone else - but it was Hughes' book that fixed the phrase for our time. - Baceseras.]