This definition of the purpose of art sounds familiar, resembling in some ways the Russian formalist description of art as an engine of defamiliarization. “Defamiliarization,” or ostranenie—alternately translated as “estrangement”—is a concept most associated with the founding father of formalism, the critic and novelist Viktor Shklovsky. “The purpose of art,” Shklovsky writes in a classic 1917 essay, “is to lead us to knowledge of a thing through the organ of sight instead of recognition.” Art takes familiar objects, which through long exposure become subject to “automized perception,” and makes us see those objects again. It systematically defeats the habituated oblivion most of us inhabit most of the time.

In highlighting habituation, the concept of ostranenie doesn’t only give an account of art’s relation to human perception. It also posits a theory of art’s relationship to itself, an explanation of the driving force of artistic change. When devices become canonized, too familiar, cliché, they lose their ability to revivify the world. Artists hoping to create living art must therefore develop new devices. And so, art moves on, is forced to change, and (in a narrowly defined sense) progresses. This account of art, consilient with modernist and avant-garde ideas of artistic innovation, encodes a set of assumptions about how an idealized— and homogeneous—modern readership comes to internalize specific expectations about art and then (repeatedly) should have those expectations shattered.