Modernism

Modernism is a weasel of a word, whose meanings slip and slide. They always have. non that rectitude should use contemporaneousness and always in the equivalent sentence. nix talked or thought about contemporaneity in the put ages - the idea of a battle between novel and constituted cultural forms was not an issue then. Now it has g ane(p) completely the new(prenominal) way. Nobody, or nobody with brains, assigns a missionary role to culture. The become of art is just one to a greater uttermost consumer product among others. Modernism is something old that we look back on, not without nostalgia. Its ashtrays and dinner sets, the chrome-tube-and-leather-strap Marcel Breuer chairs, get revived and recirculated without comment. The idea of contemporaneity connotes some kind of ideal and even quasi-official mindset. Seen in one light, it even suggests too much solidity: think of how the infinite descendants and clones of Mies van der Rohe created, in their high, bland cliffs of steel and glass, the march case of American corporate capitalism. That certainly wasnt the modernité Charles Baudelaire was thinking of in 1863 when, in The Painter of Modern Life, he described modernity as an exaltation of the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the fractional of art whose other half is the staring(a) and the immutable.

Nor was it what Jonathan western fence lizard complained of in a letter to clam parsley Pope - the work of English scribblers who send us all over their trash in Prose and Verse, with abominable curtailings and antiquated modernitys. That was in 1737, and was the prototypal and probably the last t! ime that modernism and quaintness were linked in the same sentence. The essence of modernism, to the early twentieth century, when its lessons really began to buck on, would be that it was anti-quaint: clear, clean, stripped as a piston, dealing muchover in essentials. But by quaint Swift meant something more like bizarre - he wasnt thinking of picturesqueness. Once, movements and flora that no longer seem to match up with modernism as we...If you want to get a full essay, inn it on our website: OrderCustomPaper.com

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