Word: antimodern
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...antimodern, or "postmodern," movement of the past decade has shaken this complacency. Postmodernism is just as abstract, arrogant and alienated from popular culture as "less-is-more" modernism ever was. Worse, it has abandoned all the social aspirations of the early modern movement. Yet antimodernism has demonstrated one important lesson: the absurdity of seeking a universal style. Designers talk increasingly about "pluralism," and they even picked up computer-advertising jargon about "user friendliness...
...European Romantics of the early 1800s had loudly proclaimed the primacy of the individual, the glories of revolution and similar disruptive ideas that have carried forward, with a few halts and alterations, from their time to ours. But in the 19th century there were still too many tugs in antimodern directions, too many elements of life either stifling or civilizing, depending on one's viewpoint, to allow mere anarchy. Form and ceremony were not yet dead. War itself seemed to serve as a civilizing institution, the illusion still holding that war was an ennobling experience, that destruction was good...