Word: modernist
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...World War I begins. Its mindless slaughter heightens and validates the modernist vision. Picasso, watching the military vehicles rumble through Paris, sees in their camouflage painting a kind of Cubism, therefore a kind of modernist triumph. That same year James Joyce begins Ulysses, overturning our traditional expectations for action, plot, drama and the direct impact of one character on another in the novel. "Like Proust," Edmund Wilson writes, "he is symphonic rather than narrative...musical rather than dramatic...
Lost in the bogs of Celtic myth, Yeats--unlike many of his peers in the modernist pantheon--was not much interested in modern design and architecture's streamlining ways. Or in the ability of books and magazines more and more perfectly to replicate artistic icons past and present. Or in the capacity of the movies to create their own time and space, independent of observed reality. We must imagine him, instead, mourning with the great critic Walter Benjamin the destruction of the artwork's "aura" or magic, deriving from its uniqueness, its firm roots in a specific historical place...
...Kane, not to mention its sheer panache; we may adore Bart Simpson, not least because he's such a self-conscious little transgressor, so aware of both his self-destructive impulses and his generally thwarted impulse to be better. But we have to admit that these remain rather lonely modernist gestures in mass culture. And pretty small potatoes compared with Ulysses or The Waste Land...
Would it be too modernist of me--too retro--to wish that for just this one fleeting moment between millenniums, Samuel Beckett could be my Dick Clark...
They did not, however, believe it about their own culture, especially in the field of "high" visual art. The American public, between 1900 and 1950, was distinctly timid about appreciating the work of American artists, and to modernist ones it could be quite hostile. What worked in favor of the art, in the end, was the insatiable appetite for the new that had been built into European America's social contract ever since the Puritans came to Massachusetts to create the New Jerusalem. To Americans between 1900 and 1950, however, the idea of an American Century in the arts--other...