Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

SOME MASKS OF MODERNISM
the artist as a kind of natural force or believe in “modernism” as a single line of
aesthetic development peculiarly expressive of the nature of the modern world.
To say all this, however, is not to say that we are in a “post-modern” age. The
society we live in is essentially the same as the one Picasso inhabited in 1907,
even if critics, artists, and professional intellectuals—along with many others—
have lost a sense of historical purpose and direction. Now that capitalism has
unfolded its nature on a global scale, bringing—as Marx predicted long ago—
human disasters along with the human powers it has unleashed, the limits of
conscious human control over the imperatives of the accumulation of capital
have become apparent. (Thus the architects’ and planners’ dream of the all-new
city was powerless in the face of the imperatives of real estate and business
investment, which controlled the actual forms of urban development.) But if the
belief in progress that once powered the responses to capitalist development that
went by the name of modernism has faded, the process of capital accumulation
continues. It is hard today not to agree with Walter Benjamin’s wartime vision of
history as a “catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage” at our
feet; it is still, as he said, a storm which “irresistibly propels” us “into the future
to which” our backs are turned. 17
17 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the philosophy of history” [1940], in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections,
tr. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), pp. 251–8.
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