Yet Bernard Gendron, in his thorough and insightful account of a century of game-playing between the serious and the popular, the avant garde and the mass produced, the ground-breaking and the mainstream, the difficult and the digestible, offers an intriguing overview of how these cultural counterpoints have found common ground for a century and more. In doing so, he traces a history that suggests quite strongly that the modernist project was sowing the seeds of its own demise from the very start. Modernism, as represented by the artistic standard bearers of the late 19th Century, could never resist nibbling at the fruits of the accessible and the everyday. If the painters and writers of that time spent their days dreaming of a revolution in consciousness, they were happy to spend their nights slumming it in the proletarian haunts of the newly industrialised city.

Nonetheless, the tale Gendron relates is a complex one: there is no simple progression that sees Parisian painters of the 1880s plundering the possibilities of working class café life, then New York visionaries of the 1950s co-opting the icons of mass culture - rock'n'roll, the movies and advertising - to concoct the eye-catching motifs of Pop Art. In between, the convoluted negotiation between white and black - first the fawning negritude of Paris in the 1920s, then the outrageous innovations of Negro musicians in the jazz clubs of the Big Apple in the 1940s - is just one of the extraordinary features of this survey.

If white artists in France initially appropriate the authentic primitivism of an ill-defined black community - African or African-American, savage or soulful, tribal or urban? - within 20 years, it is black musicians in the US who are at the cutting edge, making their deeply avant garde and aurally challenging noises as purveyors of the bebop revolution, leaving New Orleans and swing in its creative slipstream. And the table is turned: it is now the very sophistication of the new musical form emanating from Harlem, then the Village and 52nd Street, that inspires a generation of white post-war painters, poets and novelists, the firebrands of Abstract Expressionism and the Beat Generation bards. Along the way, New York displaces Paris as the hearth of cultural incandescence.

Not that Gendron ever suggests that the practices of the avant garde and the activities of the masses are ever so easily disentangled. Once Picasso and Cocteau have shown themselves magnetically drawn to the rumbustious vicissitudes of the café cabarets and their menu of sentimental song, emotional gesture, strong drink and worse, the notion that the high and the low are in utterly separate orbits has already been dispelled. In fact, out of this powerful chemistry between artistic risk-taking and the backstreets of proletarian roistering, it might well be argued that the bohemian prerogative, in its contemporary incarnation, is truly born.

Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club homes in on five moments to demonstrate the fluctuating associations of avant garde attitudes and popular musical movements. The first two - Paris in the 1880s and the decade after the First World War - show the artists and their modernist project in the vanguard: it is the intellectual corpus that is providing the initiative, calling the shots, paying a call on the low life and borrowing its best bits.

By the 1940s, however, there has been a significant shift and a fresh geographical focus. Bebop, a radical offshoot of the increasingly mainstream sounds of American jazz, grows out of a popular form but soon heads down avenues that are far too testing for the average listener. De-coding the new music rests with magazine critics - in Downbeat, in Metronome - who are almost invariably white. While Negro musicians - Parker, Gillespie and Monk - are the storm-troopers of change, it is an educated middle class - Nat Hentoff, Leonard Feather and others - who construct the critical context which surrounds this febrile musical innovation. So white critiques theorise a black practice.

Gendron then leaps forward to the 1960s and identifies a major re-settling of the ingredients. If rock'n'roll, the teenage pop of the next era, is initially regarded with disdain, even derision, by art aficionados and mass culture critics, the arrival of the Beatles in the US has a remarkable impact on the territory. Although Lennon, McCartney and co begin their transatlantic adventure as simply another beat group, albeit one with an English twist, within a couple of years they are being acclaimed and applauded by commentators of every level: from middle-brow newspapers to serious composers, the Fab Four are regarded as exemplars of excellence, effortlessly transgressing the boundaries between high and low art.

For the author, popular music has now seized poll position of privilege in its dealings with the avant garde, a surprising switch in emphasis. As he comments: "..[T]he Beatles themselves were leading a rock'n'roll raid across the cultural borders, scavenging brazenly from the storehouse of avant garde devices, such as collage, musique concrete, and irony. Accompanying them were Frank Zappa with his diverting parodies, the Beach Boys with their giddy electronic sounds, Eric Clapton and his improvisatory indulgences, and Jim Morrison, altogether infatuated with Baudelaire and Rimbaud. In three short years, rock'n'rolll had gone from being cast as vulgar entertainment not even suitable for adults to being hailed as the most important musical breakthrough of the decade".

In its final example, the volume explores the inter-connection between punk, the new wave and the New York art world of the 1970s and 1980s. Art-influenced rockers such as the Talking Heads, Television and Patti Smith help to provide an environment for the later alliances between the groups of the subsequent no wave - like James Chance and the Contortions and Teenage Jesus and the Jerks - and painters such as Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, with the Mudd Club a shared site of negotiation where the gallery and club ethos appears to seamlessly overlap.

Writes Gendron:

"The 'art after midnight' nightclub functioned as the symbolic mass-cultural outlet for punk art. The Mudd Club was a 'star-making machinery' for artists like Basquiat, to complement the celebrity-making machinery of the traditional gallery. It was art as entertainment, art as hip, art as the streets, art as grit, art as B movie and so on. Glimmers of this had existed before in the Montmartre cabarets or among the beat poets (who were mythological precursors of the Mudd Club crowd), but never before had it seemed so possible or desirable for art to cross the line into pop while remaining art , for the art world to merge with the pop world without losing its specificty and in particular its traditional markets".

This ambitious book - large in its scope, impressive in its rigour - offers an impressive overview of one of the most engaging side-shows in the 20th Century's cultural fairground. While Gendron's dry style marks an almost dispassionate engagement with his topic, the prose coolly analytical, his investigative endeavour cannot really be faulted. I found much of the material new to me - the Montmartre scene, the obsession with things Negro in 1920s France, bebop and its critical framework - quite fascinating, yet it was area that I had delved into quite deeply that was most gripping and ultimately most rewarding.

The account of the rise of the punk aesthetic - from its early seedings in the writings of Lester Bangs, Dave Marsh and Greg Shaw at the outset of the1970s - seems to me the most fully rounded so far. Citing this group of maverick journalists as a crucial catalyst to that musical insurrection, Gendron explains how garage of the 1960s transmuted into the new wave of the following decade. Within that intriguing sub-plot rest many of the components that enliven this whole history - the sliding signifiers of art and the popular and the critical discourses that shape their interaction.