Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

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2 SOME MASKS OF MODERNISM The days when one could sit down with an easy mind to write an account of something called “modernism” are over. One might have thought that the opposite would be the case since it has become common, over the past 25 years or so, for writers on culture to insist that this term labels a phenomenon of the past. At least in the restricted field of art history, the closure of “modernism,” thus detached from the original reference to the chronological present, might have been expected to have given the concept definability as a stylistic term. But it has not. Earlier definitional orthodoxies, such as that embodied in Alfred Barr’s famous diagram of the history of abstract art, or Clement Greenberg’s various formulations, no longer have their former power. The complexity, incompleteness, and hesitation that mark a notable recent attempt at a conceptualization, T. J. Clark’s Farewell to an Idea, 1 suggest that the purported end of modernism has if anything made the task more difficult. If we agree, in the search for a plausible minimum definition, to apply the label “modernist” to art which orients itself self-consciously to the socialhistorical reality called “modernity,” the source of the problem is clear: there is agreement neither on the limits or the content of the historical period referenced nor on what to take as the “orientation” of artistic practice to the wider field of social experience. As Raymond Williams put it, Although modernism can be clearly identified as a distinctive movement, in its deliberate distance from and challenge to more traditional forms of art and thought, it is also strongly characterized by its internal diversity of methods and emphases: a restless and often directly competitive sequence of innovations, always more immediately recognized by what they are breaking from than by what, in any simple way, they are breaking towards. 2 1 T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). 2 Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernism (London: Verso, 1989), p. 43. 9
SOME MASKS OF MODERNISM We might as well admit, therefore, that an account of modernism should range over a field of artistic practices, seeking not to define an entity but to make explicit both the relationships holding elements of that field together as a classification we have become accustomed to making, and the gaps between them that show the historical falsifications inherent in this intellectual custom. Modernity “Modern” is itself a modern word, developed originally to express the sense that the “rebirth” of western European culture after what then became the “Dark Ages” was not just a revival of ancient virtues but the creation of something new, with a character all its own. 3 The term modernus had come into existence in Medieval Latin, as an antonym to antiquus, and these terms were used already in the twelfth century for the two sides of a controversy between the adherents of antique poetry and the practitioners of a new poetics. But essential to the idea of this contrast as it developed after the Renaissance was the conception of history as a progress through a sequence of distinct stages. In this conception the present day is not just a period of time, but a period of history, characterized by features differentiating it from other eras, such as Antiquity or the Middle Ages. Thus we have a series of contrasts with earlier periods, expressed in such images as Enlightenment’s overcoming of the darkness of the feudal age, or in the mythology of the “organic,” “traditional” community of the preindustrial past so basic to early sociology. Set against such contrast categories, modern politics, learning, science, art are conceived of as more than contemporaries; they are aspects of a unity: modernity. Something fundamental in this conception was correct: the appearance of “modernity” as cultural category was a response to the development of a new commercial and then industrial mode of social life. It is not an accident, and is more than symbolically appropriate, that Descartes’s Discourse on Method—the initiating document of modern philosophy, written in French not Latin and beginning with the rejection of classical and scholastic tradition—was written amidst the commercial bustle of seventeenth-century Amsterdam. As is indicated by the use, during the last half-century, of the locution “modern society” as a euphemism for capitalism, and of “modernization” for the destruction of noncapitalist social formations and the expansion of the market together with the institution of wage labor, “modernity” can be taken as a name of the social order which, originating in the late medieval period, by the eighteenth century was already becoming the determining presence in Europe and North America, and which today, in various forms, covers the globe. The advent of this social order impressed itself on the consciousness of people with the speed and violence with 3 For the history of “modern” and “modernity,” see Chapter 1 of Matei Calinescu’s excellent Five Faces of Modernity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987). 10
Page 2: ART IN ITS TIME Art writing normall
Page 5 and 6: First published 2003 by Routledge 1
Page 8: CONTENTS List of illustrations ix P
Page 12 and 13: PREFACE In writing this book I have
Page 14 and 15: 1 INTRODUCTION The ten chapters tha
Page 16 and 17: INTRODUCTION ideology, as I am atte
Page 18 and 19: INTRODUCTION process as practically
Page 20 and 21: INTRODUCTION articulation of nonver
Page 24 and 25: SOME MASKS OF MODERNISM which it di
Page 26 and 27: SOME MASKS OF MODERNISM chaotic mov
Page 28 and 29: SOME MASKS OF MODERNISM the faces o
Page 30 and 31: SOME MASKS OF MODERNISM Figure 2.2
Page 32 and 33: SOME MASKS OF MODERNISM Figure 2.3
Page 34 and 35: SOME MASKS OF MODERNISM private str
Page 36 and 37: SOME MASKS OF MODERNISM the artist
Page 38 and 39: ART AND MONEY action taken to turn
Page 40 and 41: ART AND MONEY Diderot’s version o
Page 42 and 43: ART AND MONEY Luxury and corruption
Page 44 and 45: ART AND MONEY financed not only by
Page 46 and 47: ART AND MONEY of Plato with whom th
Page 48 and 49: ART AND MONEY When a handful of spe
Page 50 and 51: ART AND MONEY might confuse the hon
Page 52 and 53: ART AND MONEY complaint about the r
Page 54 and 55: ART AND MONEY comparison with Kant
Page 56 and 57: ART AND MONEY experience of the bea
Page 58 and 59: ART AND MONEY worthy inheritors of
Page 60 and 61: BEAUTIFUL AND SUBLIME It is, we mus
Page 62 and 63: BEAUTIFUL AND SUBLIME strength. Cri
Page 64 and 65: BEAUTIFUL AND SUBLIME In Rousseau
Page 66 and 67: BEAUTIFUL AND SUBLIME two centuries
Page 68 and 69: BEAUTIFUL AND SUBLIME exemplified b
Page 70 and 71: BEAUTIFUL AND SUBLIME Figure 4.1 Jo
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BEAUTIFUL AND SUBLIME “beautiful
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BEAUTIFUL AND SUBLIME and political
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BEAUTIFUL AND SUBLIME The paintings
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BEAUTIFUL AND SUBLIME In this pictu
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world will be long in freeing itsel
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69 Figure 4.2 Eugène Delacroix, De
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BEAUTIFUL AND SUBLIME always has a
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the sublime and the beautiful—cal
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THE RATIONALIZATION OF ART “Spiri
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THE RATIONALIZATION OF ART als, wit
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THE RATIONALIZATION OF ART The dist
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THE RATIONALIZATION OF ART members
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THE RATIONALIZATION OF ART image, e
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THE RATIONALIZATION OF ART which de
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6 MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION IN THE AG
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MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION Almost none
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MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION models were
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MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION But we are
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MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION They repres
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MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION have alread
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MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION And they pr
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MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION It is evide
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MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION order of be
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MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION triumph as
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PORK AND PORCELAIN extent not only
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PORK AND PORCELAIN support of the B
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PORK AND PORCELAIN for the distinct
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PORK AND PORCELAIN of the very rich
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PORK AND PORCELAIN ment censorship
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PORK AND PORCELAIN private foundati
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8 THE AESTHETICS OF ANTI-AESTHETICS
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THE AESTHETICS OF ANTI-AESTHETICS o
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THE AESTHETICS OF ANTI-AESTHETICS
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THE AESTHETICS OF ANTI-AESTHETICS p
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THE AESTHETICS OF ANTI-AESTHETICS p
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THE AESTHETICS OF ANTI-AESTHETICS O
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THE AESTHETICS OF ANTI-AESTHETICS r
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THE AESTHETICS OF ANTI-AESTHETICS C
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THE PHILOSOPHY OF ANDY WARHOL Warho
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THE PHILOSOPHY OF ANDY WARHOL readi
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THE PHILOSOPHY OF ANDY WARHOL print
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THE PHILOSOPHY OF ANDY WARHOL and E
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THE PHILOSOPHY OF ANDY WARHOL 1989
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THE PHILOSOPHY OF ANDY WARHOL found
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THE PHILOSOPHY OF ANDY WARHOL ident
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Buchloh sees the political limitati
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THE PHILOSOPHY OF ANDY WARHOL conte
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THE AVANT-GARDE IN FASHION Figure 1
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THE AVANT-GARDE IN FASHION recast a
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Such a view is more plausible in re
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THE AVANT-GARDE IN FASHION “strip
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THE AVANT-GARDE IN FASHION the unif
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THE AVANT-GARDE IN FASHION long con
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THE AVANT-GARDE IN FASHION had its
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THE AVANT-GARDE IN FASHION wrong. A
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THE AVANT-GARDE IN FASHION One can
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CLASSLESS TASTE home or being aroun
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CLASSLESS TASTE Burning call “aca
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CLASSLESS TASTE It would be pervers
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CLASSLESS TASTE ing, as the boundar
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Adams, Abigail 48 Adorno, Theodor 5
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play 41ff Pocock, J. G. A. 28 n. 16
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Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

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