Examine the Term "Modernism" with reference to two or three works of Art

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Anna Harmsen Corcuera

Examine the Term “Modernism” with reference to two or three          works of Art

        The terms “modern”, “modernity” and “modernism” are commonly used to specify a break in history, marking a definition between the present and the past, between the fashionable and the out of date, and carry as part of their meaning an almost criticism of tradition. By calling himself a “modernist”, the artist is instantly free to work on a clean plate, without the limitations of tradition with its set of rules or its fixed criteria.

        It is commonly thought that the Modernist movement was only properly established during the late nineteenth Century, being triggered by ground breaking developments in the areas of science, technology and the economic market. Art was suddenly discovered to be an increasingly useful tool in science, whilst technology was developing new means of reproducing graphic images that widened and spread the use and influence of art. At the same time, the growth in market and social consumption was turning art into a product to be sold, rather than commissioned. These three factors created a need for a new form of art, which like capitalism was in a constant state of change.

Other factors that triggered the development of modernism include a “major cultural shift from a time-honored aesthetics of permanence, based on a belief in an unchanging and transcendental ideal of beauty, to an aesthetics of transitoriness and immanence, whose central values are change and novelty”. Since Roman times and even during the last half of the seventeenth Century, beauty was still looked upon as a transcendental, fixed model of an ideal. Artists might have considered themselves above their masters, but only in conjunction to the belief that they had a better grasp and wider knowledge in conveying this model.

It was only during the late eighteenth Century and early nineteenth Century that a new “aesthetic modernity” arose, under the title “romanticism”, bringing with it the first signs of a reaction against the laws of classism. Romanticism scrapped the idea of a timeless ideal beauty, replacing it by a “sense of presentness and immediacy”.

 Time, under a capitalist civilization, was looked upon as a relatively precious commodity, measured socially, and with the ability to be sold or purchased in the market. This Change of culture also brought about a different idea of self, which in relation to time, referred to the personal and imaginative ‘durée’, which cannot be measured in hours or minutes. It was this grasp of self and time that built the basis for the new modernist culture. Perhaps this idea is more easily understood when in relation to our social plane today, with it’s emphasis on instant joy and fun morality, which in turn create a confusion between self-realization and basic self-gratification. In today’s pop cult we are imprisoned by a grave contradiction in society. On the one hand, advertising and marketing have immersed us into a life of compulsive consumption, and we are led to believe that happiness can easily be paid for at a beauty centre or purchased in a bottle of aromatic bath salts…on the other, we are also expected to work day in and day out, in order to keep up the organised business corporations that make these products, and are wanted to accept delayed self-gratification.  This contradiction between expected lifestyles have caused us to become ‘straight’ during the day, and ‘party-animals’ during the night, placing a strong contrasting emphasis on time,  between the fear of boredom, and the pressure of deadlines.

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This idea of time, closely related with the view of art as both pay and display, are among the prime factors that constitute the artistic style called ‘Kitsch’, which in turn is one of the most typical  products of modernism, because it is in this type of art that this conflict of modernity is openly confronted. Whilst representing the triumph of the principle of immediacy (instant access, immediate effect, ‘instant-beauty’), it appears as designed both to ‘save’ and to ‘kill’ time. To save time, in the sense that it’s enjoyment is effortless and instantaneous; to kill time, in the ...

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