[I]t is increasingly clear that there are no topics or phenomena to which a feminist analysis is not relevant—at which point it is useful to consider feminist theory ...  as a set of techniques, rather than as a fixed set of positions or models.

The state of the art world and of feminism in the twenty-first century ushers in different ways of doing political activism, cultural work and theory. The intergenerational aspects of feminism and how this has been enacted in the visual arts in recent years represents a refreshing change from earlier perceptions of waves of feminist theory that tended to privilege the new. The visual metaphor of the new wave dashing the old against the shore appears to replicate traditional paradigms in what some have called either an Electra or an Oedipal contestation where the new generation kills the old feminist mother in order to please the father (the academy).

Marshs article is largely in response to Bernard Smiths article In Defence of Art History (I&II) published in Art Monthly 2000. Smiths essays were part of a larger debate between art historians and those aligning themselves with either the new art history, or postmodern methodologies associated with cultural studies or virtual culture. Marsh refers to the works of key figures such as Rosalind Krauss, Hal Foster, Peter Greenaway, David Lynch, Caravaggio, Lyndal Walker, David Rosetzky, Versacci, Clement Greenberg, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Jean Baudrillard, Walter Benjamin, Thomas Crow and Marcel Proust.