During the second half of the ’70s there was a moment when the river of art burst its banks and broke into thousands of rivulets. And art, that quintessential expression of Western culture, underwent a profound transformation; what science calls a “hopeful monster” was born. It will be the task of future philologists to establish the hows and the whys, and whether the first mutation came about in Germany or in Italy, whether it emerged within an Anglo-Saxon milieu or took root on the continent between the Rhine and the Oder-Neisse, or between the Alps and the Gulf of Naples. What is certain at