In this startling interdisciplinary revision of avant-garde history, John Cage takes his rightful place as Wordsworth's great and final heir. George Leonard traces a direct line from Cage, Pop and Conceptual Art through the Futurists to Whitman, Emerson, Ruskin, Carlyle, and Wordsworth, showing how the art of everyday objects, seemingly an exclusively contemporary phenomenon, actually continues and culminates a project begun as far back as 1800.

Much of his book concerns Cage and end-of-art philosopher Arthur Danto, both of whom helped the author develop the sections about their work, as did many contemporary artists and theorists. The result, including at last a full exploration of Cage's relationship with the Zen of D. T. Suzuki, with Italian Futurism, and with New England transcendentalism, makes it impossible henceforth to speak of Cage without Wordsworth and Emerson, of Warhol without Whitman, of 1960s Concept Art without Ruskin.

.

When John Cage opened his compositions to chance sounds in the 1950s, and Andy Warhol began exhibiting paintings of Brillo boxes in the 1960s, the art of the commonplace seemed like something radically, even frighteningly, new. But noting an unprecedented shift, around 1800, away from the idealism of Western aesthetics, Leonard shows that attacks on the art object as outspoken as any made by twentieth-century avant-gardists can be found in the works of Wordsworth, Ruskin, Carlyle, Emerson, and Whitman.

From Wordsworth to Cage, a certain kind of artist sought to re-orient humanity's devotion from the next world to this one, to situate paradise in "the simple produce of the common day." "Enough of Science and Art," Wordsworth began his first book of poems. "Come forth into the light of things." Two hundred years later, John Cage would tell us, "We open our eyes and ears seeing life, each day excellent as it is. This realization no longer needs art." By studying artists together with poets, Leonard uncovers the rich tradition that links Wordsworth to Cage and illuminates many figures in between.

Into the Light of Things transforms our understanding of modern culture.