Comment by nemo

"the abandonment of representation everywhere in the world"

Worth checking out Socialist Realism, both the thing that motivated the CIA to fund and promote non-representative art and help develop it into a fad, and also a large corpus of representative art that existed when you imagine it did not (there's many others besides, non-representative art has always been a small niche relative to all art produced which is primarily abstract or representative once you start to look outside galleries and museums).