The widespread suspicion of the domination of vision in modern culture expressed by many French intellectuals this century has influenced the practice and self-understanding of recent American art. By tracing the impact of such thinkers as Bataille, Foucault and Derrida and artists like Duchamp, this paper seeks to explain the repudiation of the High Modernist valorisation of pure optically championed by Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried in the immediate postwar era. Although the displacement of the center of gravity of modernist art from Paris to New York after 1945 has been widely remarked, the later »revenge« of French theory, transmitted by critics like Rosalind Krauss and Norman Bryson, has not. Its impact has helped undermine the value of Abstract Expressionism in favor of other movements like neo-Dada, Conceptual Art and Minimalism, which can be understood in part as a denigration of the primacy of visual values.Razširjeno sumničenje nadvlade vida v moderni kulturi, ki so ga v tem stoletju izrazili številni francoski intelektualci, je vplivalo na prakso in samorazumevanje nedavne ameriške umetnosti. S sledenjem vpliva mislecev, kakršni so Bataille, Foucault in Derrida ter umetnikov, kot je Duchamp, skuša članek razložiti zavračanje visokomodernističnega vrednotenja čiste optičnosti, ki sta ga v dobi neposredno po drugi svetovni vojni zagovarjala Clement Greenberg ter Michael Fried. Čeprav so pogosto komentirali premestitev težišča modernistične umetnosti iz Pariza v New York po letu 1945, to ne velja za kasnejše »maščevanje« francoske teorije, ki so ga v angloameriški kulturni prostor prenesli kritiki, kakršna sta Rosalind Krauss in Norman Bryson. Vpliv te teorije je pomagal spodkopati vrednost abstraktnega ekspresionizma v korist drugih gibanj, kakršna so neodada, konceptualna umetnost in minimalizem, kijih lahko delno razumemo kot zavračanje prvenstvenosti vizualnih vrednot
