The products of more recent times may seem to be labelled more precisely because the number of extant examples and the survival of critics', artists', and others' views of such products provide a clearer picture of the meaning of cultural change. When the prefix "post" is employed, however, it generally signifies some important change that cannot be adequately described by the simple application of a new label.

             Post-Impressionism is an example of this. Since Giotto, the dominant enterprise in Western painting had been the replication of the visual world on two-dimensional surfaces. Despite a variety of different approaches and changes in the economic and social meanings of painting, this tradition continued down to the Impressionists. The work of the Impressionist painters was essentially another refinement in Western painting's project of representing the observed world (and giving its forms even to those objects that could not be observed). Thus, the application of the term post-Impressionist to a varied group of painters, signalled a break from the dominant enterprise of representation. The efforts of the post-Impressionists constituted the first attempt to discard the accurate replication of visual experience as the goal of painting. Though this was not a break in the sense of discarding all previous influence, it did constitute a major shift in goals that disallowed the mere use of yet another label identifying a new sensibility or a new technique.

             This remarkable shift in European painting paralleled breaks with the past in the other arts as well. Old forms were replaced, and the artist became '.a dandy or an anti-commercial radical, sometimes both"(Williams, 1989: 50). Beginning with photography, the wave of innovations in the media of cultural production, which continues to this day, produced the '.defensive cultural groupings of Cubists, Futurists, Constructivists, and so many others" (Williams, 1989: 50).