(no subject)
...works of art need not imitate or represent natural objects and events. Therefore artistic activity is not essentially concerned with representation but instead with the invention of objects variously expressive of human experience, objects whose structures as independent artistic entities cannot be evaluated in terms of their likeness, not devalued because of their lack of likeness, to natural things....
...finally it is inevitable--or at least expected--in any discussion of modernism that the question of "postmodernism" will rear its ugly head. Or should I say, its wrong-headedness? For the entire concept of postmodernism is based on a fundamental misconception--a belief that the modernist era in art and culture is over and has been supplanted by something radically different. What we find this usually means when we get down to specific cases is a mode of art or thought in which some element of modernist sensibility has been corrupted by kitsch, politics, social theory, gender theory, or some other academic, pop-oriented, anti-aesthetic intervention. Modernism has aged to be sure, as modernity itself has aged, and in the process modernism has undeniably lost its capacity to shock or otherwise disturb us. But except for the short-lived antics of Dada and Surrealism, shock was never the essence of modernism. It was, rather, an inspired and highly successful attempt to bring art and culture into an affective and philosophical alignment with the mindset of modernity as we know it in our daily lives...
...Looking back at the history of modernism in the twentieth century, what is especially striking is the violence that was directed against its achievements by the most horrific totalitarian regimes in recorded history: the Nazis in Hitler's Germany and the Communists in Stalin's Russia. And if we ask the question of what it was about modernist art hat prompted such a massively destructive response, I believe the answer is clear: modernist art was seen to provide a spiritual and emotional haven from the coercive and conformist pressures of the societies in which it flourished. Modernism represented a freedom of mind that totalitarian regimes could not abide. It is in this sense, perhaps, that the infamous Degenerate Art exhibition that Hitlet devoted to modernist art in Munich in 1937 may not be seen to have marked the beginning of "postmodernist" impulse. And just as modernism survived the determined efforts of hitler and Stalin to impugn and destroy its artistic achievements, so, I believe will modernism and its institutions continue to prosper in the face of the nihilist imperatives of the postmodernist scam..."
-Hilton Kramer
...finally it is inevitable--or at least expected--in any discussion of modernism that the question of "postmodernism" will rear its ugly head. Or should I say, its wrong-headedness? For the entire concept of postmodernism is based on a fundamental misconception--a belief that the modernist era in art and culture is over and has been supplanted by something radically different. What we find this usually means when we get down to specific cases is a mode of art or thought in which some element of modernist sensibility has been corrupted by kitsch, politics, social theory, gender theory, or some other academic, pop-oriented, anti-aesthetic intervention. Modernism has aged to be sure, as modernity itself has aged, and in the process modernism has undeniably lost its capacity to shock or otherwise disturb us. But except for the short-lived antics of Dada and Surrealism, shock was never the essence of modernism. It was, rather, an inspired and highly successful attempt to bring art and culture into an affective and philosophical alignment with the mindset of modernity as we know it in our daily lives...
...Looking back at the history of modernism in the twentieth century, what is especially striking is the violence that was directed against its achievements by the most horrific totalitarian regimes in recorded history: the Nazis in Hitler's Germany and the Communists in Stalin's Russia. And if we ask the question of what it was about modernist art hat prompted such a massively destructive response, I believe the answer is clear: modernist art was seen to provide a spiritual and emotional haven from the coercive and conformist pressures of the societies in which it flourished. Modernism represented a freedom of mind that totalitarian regimes could not abide. It is in this sense, perhaps, that the infamous Degenerate Art exhibition that Hitlet devoted to modernist art in Munich in 1937 may not be seen to have marked the beginning of "postmodernist" impulse. And just as modernism survived the determined efforts of hitler and Stalin to impugn and destroy its artistic achievements, so, I believe will modernism and its institutions continue to prosper in the face of the nihilist imperatives of the postmodernist scam..."
-Hilton Kramer