Perhaps most significantly, however, present-day social and political realities are uncannily reminiscent of those of the modernist era. Global financial crisis, ever-present threats to security, accelerated developments in science and technology and a widening division between rich and poor contribute to the recognition of a fundamentally altered world order, particularly with regard to the new political teleogies that fast-emerging super-economies have already begun to establish.
All of these issues informed the original modernist agenda which, while vacillating between optimism and despair, was nevertheless convinced of the supremacy of art and its ability to make sense of a raidly changing world.
Given the specific relation of modernism to the European cultural psyche, it's perhaps unsurprising that for US artists, post-war abstraction seems to provide more relevant aesthetic models.
Certainly curious, however, is the tendency to bypass the quintessentially American nature of abstract expressionism for later, though certainly related, abstract movements such as minimalism and hard-edge painting.
http://www.modernedition.com/art-articles/new-abstract-artists/new-abstract-art.html