Word: modernist
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...EVERY young art consumer worth knowing will tell you, there is no room for adventure in the modernist world. Action went out of style long ago. Smuggling, suspense, suitcases full of money, and tales of exotic islands don't make it anymore. It's kid's stuff, or worse, it's boor's stuff...
...style known as cloisonism. The French cloison means "division" or "partition," and it was applied to a kind of enamelware whose patches of bright color were separated by fine metal lines. Largely because of the intensity of Van Gogh's genius, cloisonism became one of the key modernist styles, the sign of a new concern with the semantics of art (which were being explored in a totally different way by Cezanne in Aix and by Seurat with his light-filled dots), indicating a degree of aesthetic fundamentalism that had not been seen since Ingres...
...lake, in contrast to the importance that the Dada wood reliefs of Jean Arp have since assumed within the history of art. Even when Dada was politicized after the war, its actual effect on German politics was nil, and its impact on radical thought probably much smaller than the modernist legend would have us think...
...lost its "political" role. At the same time, although we still have lots of art - a stream of it, feeding an apparently insatiable market and providing endless opportunities for argument, exegesis and comparison - painting and sculpture have ceased to act with the urgency that was once part of the modernist contract. They change, but their changing no longer seems as important as it did in 1900, or 1930, or even 1960. When one speaks of the end of modernism, one does not invoke a sudden historical terminus. Histories do not break off clean, like a glass rod; they fray, stretch...
...with modernism, only more so, because we are much closer to it. Its reflexes still jerk, the severed limbs twitch; the parts are still there, but they no longer connect or function as a live whole. The modernist achievement will continue to affect culture for another century at least, because it was large, so imposing and so irrefutably convincing. But its dynamic is gone, and our relationship to it is becoming archaeological. Picasso is no longer a contemporary, or a father figure; he is a remote ancestor, who can inspire admiration but not opposition. The age of the New, like...