The author focuses on the current attitudes to art, architecture and design manifested in what has come to be called the "post-modern era". In the 1980s the art of previous avant-gardes which both celebrated technological advance and challenged the material values of capitalist society has been embraced into museums and the traditional hierarchy of values in modern art has apparently been eradicated. What Hewison sets out to present is an indication of ways in which contemporary artists in various media are seeking to offer a challenege to official values and now they may contribute to a "critical culture" for the nineties, in place of the philosophiocal stagnation of the current decade.