The Ashcan School successfully challenged academic art institutions, and the authority of the National Academy of Design as a cultural arbiter declined throughout the 1910s. At a time when the realist fiction of Theodore Dreiser and Frank Norris was gaining a wider audience and when muckraking journalists were calling attention to slum conditions in American cities, the Ashcan painters played a role in enlarging the nation's sense of what a suitable topic for artistic expression might be. The difference, though, between the realist writers and socially-minded journalists, on the one hand, and the painters, on the other hand, was that the Ashcan artists did not see their work primarily as social or political criticism.