Modernism

Modernism is a weasel of a word, whose meanings slip and slide. They always have. non that ace should use contemporaneousness and always in the equivalent sentence. cipher talked or thought about contemporaneity in the optic ages - the idea of a battle between novel and open up cultural forms was not an issue then. Now it has g peerless(p) completely the new(prenominal) way. Nobody, or nobody with brains, assigns a missionary role to culture. The hunt down of art is just one to a greater bound 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 modernity connotes some kind of ideal and even quasi-official mindset. Seen in one light, it even suggests too much solidity: think of how the innumerable descendants and clones of Mies van der Rohe created, in their high, bland cli ffs of steel and glass, the pageant 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 contemporaneousness as an exaltation of the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the one-half of art whose other half is the staring(a) and the immutable.

Nor was it what Jonathan fleet 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 contemporaneitys. That was in 1737, and wa s the prototypal and probably the last time! 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 whole shebang that no longer seem to match up with modernism as we...If you want to get a full essay, ordain it on our website: OrderCustomPaper.com

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