
What the Hell Was Modernism? - whatami
https://www.vulture.com/2019/10/jerry-saltz-new-moma-modernism.html
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bonecrusher2102
What a great read. I think that we see the same thing in poetry as well -- the
inaccessible modernist expiriments with form, while interesting to insiders,
is at its conclusion an esoteric pursuit.

I think that the turn back toward classical forms, towards a broader audience,
and largely the turn inward (the self as the primary concern of the work,
rather than it's form) really is a wonderful new wave across many genres, and
makes for an wonderful time to be a consumer of art.

~~~
hestipod
I don't know if it's the same for everyone, but I know with age and I hope
"maturity" I appreciate many more forms of art. Things I didn't have the life
experience or emotional depth to grasp when I was younger can deeply impact me
now. An example would be Mark Rothko's paintings. I would have said "pfft
anyone can do that...just some stripes or blocks" when I was a kid, and
probably did, but have recently rediscovered his work and absolutely love it.
Same with a lot of poetry as you mentioned. I really regret not having more
openness and ability to grasp these things before. I really wish I had more
health and life stability, and the resultant time and means to explore and
experience creative things.

~~~
puranjay
I never really understood modern art until I a) saw it in person, and b) saw
it in the context of its time.

I was at the Hermitage museum in St Petersburg. I'd done museum tour after
museum tour in both Moscow and Petersburg. Nearly all of this art was
classical/neo-classical or romantic, rococo, etc.

By the end of your 1000th neo-classical painting, you get exhausted of the
sameness of the realistic style. The themes, colors, sensibilities all appear
similar.

Then I walked into the modern and post-modern hall and there was a massive
Matisse painting on the wall. The bright blue was such a revelation. You see a
painting like that after 400 years worth of realistic painting style and it
takes your breath away. It was particularly impactful when contrasted against
the neoclassical architecture of the museum itself.

The worst way to appreciate modern and post modern art is on a computer
screen. These things have to be experienced in person. For one, their sheer
size can't be captured on screen. A 12' x 10' canvas has a visual impact
that's not possible to replicate anywhere. Second, their experimental quality
has to be contrasted against the dominant art forms of their time. Anyone can
technically paint like Matisse. But they didn't.

~~~
thedaemon
I don't think the size of any painting can make it better. Especially if it's
something a 2 year old can and will paint. As an artist myself, I've always
disliked and never understood why people like modernist artworks. Picasso's
best work was his early work, before he gave up on painting life. That some
people think they get this crap artwork is just hilarious and just goes to
show you can hock anything if you pretend it's high minded.

And your statement "Anyone can technically paint like Matisse. But they
didn't." That's probably because noone wants to paint like a child and wants
to be considered a good artist not a joke.

Believe me, in 1000 years no one will care about Modernist artwork.

~~~
graemeo
What a sad and myopic take on art, especially coming from a self-proclaimed
artist. Obviously you're entitled to your opinion, but why make such bitter
sounding absolutist statements about what other people create or enjoy?
There's enough negativity in this world already.

Additionally, the fact that you're judging the relative worth of a piece of
art based on it lasting for 1000 years is pretty sad, in my opinion. What is
wrong with art being created for a specific time and place? Life is ephemeral,
and there is beauty in that.

~~~
thedaemon
You make very good points and I'd have to agree with you if this was anything
other than "modern art".

Modern art is not art in the sense it's not a highly crafted work. It's
minimum effort.

The time frame was given to acknowledge the fact that we think this is "art".
In the future we will know this is junk and not art.

I really dislike most pop art, but at least it's art. A big yellow square
canvas in no way should constitute artwork.

~~~
puranjay
You're conflating craftsmanship with art.

There are literally factories in China where painters paint replicas of
classic art works at scale. They paint hundreds, even thousands of such pieces
every year.

They're undoubtedly very skilled painters. But would you call their work
"art"?

How much time and effort something takes has no bearing on whether or not it
is art. Something that takes 5 years to make isn't automatically better than
something done in 5 minutes.

Painters like Picasso and Matisse were also classically trained and had all
the skills to paint like the painters of old. They just chose not to.

~~~
thedaemon
I would call their work art. You don't call it art? Now you are being just
like me.

Exactly my point about Picasso, his early work was awesome. What everyone
likes from his is terrible.

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mike00632
>And before you object that we’ve been living for 50 years in postmodernism,
not modernism, the art that followed the titans of the early-20th century was
defined and even named after what preceded it (daddy issues?).

Postmodernism isn't just "not modernism" or the art that happens after
modernism. Postmodernism is art that only makes sense in the context of
modernism. It involves pastiche, genre criticism and meta-analysis.

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pierremenard
> Third, modernism was built on the principle that formal experimentation is
> the only thing that matters.

This is the most appealing thing about modernism to me — instead of continuing
an _exploitation_ of techniques that had been perfected, modernism was an
_exploration_ of what was possible — an attempted unbundling of the things
that strike us about art like color, shape, texture, forms, frames, etc. The
fatalism is a necessary consequence of this idea of taking some simple axioms
and carrying them to their extremes.

~~~
yason
For architecture, this exploration is fine but they mostly shouldn't have been
allowed to use existing city centres as the playground for their explorations
and in doing so ruin the social and architectural fabric that had been
breathing life into these cities for generations and centuries.

Take your modernist glass-steel-concrete geometry art piece, build it in the
perimeter of the city in a park, woods, or plains where nobody can see it
unless they choose to travel and explicitly enjoy the sight, and leave the old
streets and traditional houses in the city because they are there for a
reason. The modernist architecture would have had a much better reputation had
they just succumbed to their rightful position, and acknowledged that in their
exploration they were still prototyping and far from having deliverables.

~~~
valiant55
I'm not sure I agree that modern architecture ruined social and architectural
fabric of cities. Holding up vernacular architecture as some sort of beacon
because it's been in cities "for generations and centuries" is equivalent to
not performing a change in say software, "because that's the we've always done
it."

Besides a few notable examples of poor execution (20 Fenchurch Street in
London, Richards Medical Research Laboratories off the top of my head) can you
point to an instance where a piece of modern architecture was detrimental to
the cityscape it inhabited?

~~~
mannykannot
You have drifted off-point here, which is the destruction of what is good for
something mediocre or worse, as in the functionally and aesthetically
disastrous destruction of Penn station in NYC (there are software analogies to
be made here, if you think they are useful - e.g. Windows Vista.)

I think there is a lot of value in bold new design, and it is worth taking
risks, but it encourages two sorts of copycats: the developer who wants to
make a statement on the cheap, which allegedly gave us the back side of the
New York By Gehry, and the second-rate architect who wants to express himself
rather than serve the community, which results in a rash of undistinguished
architectural misdemeanors, rather than high-profile cases.

Now that the high tide of dogmatic modernism seems to have passed, its
excesses offers sites that can be redeveloped without losing anything of
value.

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7thaccount
Larry Wall (creator of Perl) has a really long (but fantastic) speech on
modernism and post-modernism that I found helpful. It is transcribed somewhere
and worth the read.

Edit:

[http://www.wall.org/~larry/pm.html](http://www.wall.org/~larry/pm.html)

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m0llusk
Alternatively, modernism represents where Romanticism led us. Forget austere
and orderly Classicism and just feel. Modernism made it this far by engaging
people viscerally whether they understood a specific message or not.

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sings
I feel like one reason we’re “stuck with modernism” is that it’s an umbrella
term that points to many distinct forms which are reacting against some
tradition. In this sense, it’s a pretty useless term, as distinct periods will
always be reacting against what has come before, otherwise we wouldn’t note
them as such.

~~~
yk
The thing is, art historians have stopped demarcating ages. (A bit like
anthropologists stopped making lists of the best African tribes, even though
that would be great fodder for buzzfeed.)

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tabtab
Almost all eras have extreme, overdone, or ridiculous works done in it. We
tend to forget such over time and remember the good ones, or at least the most
controversial or novel ones.

Some of the depictions of hell around the early renaissance can make one
cringe just as much as some "modern" art. The flying wanker from the Roman
Pompey ruins is also a hoot.

The lack of perspective in medieval art is still a curious puzzle, because the
pre-Christian Romans had be using fairly decent forms of perspective. The
knowledge existed. It's as if the early Christians _intended_ the result to
look abstract and symbolic to remove it from mortal-hood.

~~~
michaelscott
The move toward a flatter perspective was deliberate and religiously
motivated, in order to remove art from the potential for idolatry. It's why
illuminated manuscript is such a big deal artistically and why there are so
few sculptural works from the period as well.

There are parallels in Islamic art as well, where the artistic focus is on
calligraphy and architecture as opposed to the more regular forms seen in the
West before and after the medieval period.

~~~
goto11
How did a flatter perspective remove the potential for idolatry? You are still
depicting religious figures.

~~~
michaelscott
The idea was basically more perspective == more realistic and therefore closer
to a temptation to worship (not all figures depicted in the period were
necessarily religious). It's not a particularly compelling argument but
there's a lot from the thinking in that period that wasn't very logical.

~~~
tabtab
Maybe Heaven is 2D. Practice on a flat harp (not flat notes).

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deltron3030
Modernism for me is systems, process and indirection between artist/designer
and the work, where the effort is more put into designing those systems and
tools and being able to control the consistency of the output by tweaking the
parameters of the system, tool and process. A good and extreme example are
fonts or vector/parametric design software.

Before that, in the classical era it was more about raw skills through
practice and reaching some kind of wonderkid level of excellence measured by
popular standards that were tied to complexity, e.g. the most realistic
painting or most beautiful form of an object. One example, to stay in the
realm of type would be script calligraphy, where letterers learn script styles
and try to reproduce them as best as possible.

Postmodernism gets rid of the systems and indirection and is more about direct
human expression and originality, without trying that hard to reach an ideal
or make the most realistic like in the classical era. The example in type
would be freestyle hand lettering or graffiti writing, or even normal
handwriting, and accepting and embracing the imperfections that are generated
by your own body which results in your own recognizable style.

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smileypete
Not a big fan of modern art, but I've a soft spot for Gilbert and George, one
of the first to create art that literally was shit, or at least incorporated
it. :)

Plus they lived in an area of London that was pretty rough back in the day,
long before it was trendy.

These days their work has been swamped by a tidal wave (including sharks, and
other creatures in formaldehyde...) but they were among the pioneers.

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kkwteh
Reading this piece reaffirmed a lot of what I had been feeling in the SFMoma
my last couple of visits. The place just felt lifeless. All the art was really
disconnected from the world, and the abstract stuff seemed especially
pointless.

