Word: moderns
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Luxembourg's Musée d'Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean has almost everything a modern art museum could want: a prime location overlooking the nation's capital, a dramatic new building designed by renowned architect I.M. Pei and an expected deluge of art-hungry visitors. Luxembourg is one of this year's European Capitals of Culture, and a new TGV fast-train line from France opens in June...
...Just one thing is missing from the museum: modern art. Since its opening last July, the place has seemed oddly empty. Unlike its more established peers - Paris' Pompidou Center, Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum, New York City's Museum of Modern Art - the Grand-Duc Jean (named after the sovereign who retired in 2000) doesn't have much of a permanent collection. Planners behind Mudam, as the Musée d'Art Moderne is known for short, started buying works about a decade ago. Even then, Monets and Manets were beyond their budget, and a Picasso was out of the question...
...Sancho Silva's plywood shapes that can be assembled by museumgoers into furniture of their own design. Mudam has purchased a few Majerus paintings, though nearly all those on display have been lent by other museums. The artist remains a favorite of curators worldwide, from London's Tate Modern to Mexico City's Jumex Collection...
Since Hegel, western European writers and leaders have been pushing the idea of progress, putting darkness, savagery, the past, and societies outside of Western civilization on one end of the spectrum, and light, consciousness, technology, the future, and the modern Western world at the other end. Of all the civilizations and cultures that once lay beyond the dominion (and ken) of Western civilization, those located in Africa have been portrayed as the furthest back on the dark end of the continuum. Hegel wrote, “Africa proper…is the land of childhood, which lying beyond...
...primitive Africans by transforming them into little dark Frenchmen and women. Now there are Western-educated aid workers, politicians, professors, and organizers pushing the materialist religions of free-market capitalism and Marxism (both ideological descendents of Hegel), the backwardness of non-Western societies, and the bright future of modern technology and the American way of life. One of the unstated goals of globalization seems to be the cultural assimilation of poor Africans into the American middle-class culture of consumption. Unfortunately, this “new” spectrum of progress seems to have become almost universally accepted on both...