From: Patsloane-AT-aol.com
Date: Tue, 23 May 2000 10:40:23 EDT
Subject: Re: hating the modern


I think one has to be exceedingly careful of generalizations about the 
"personalities" of artists. There are in fact innumerable examples of artists 
over the ages, from Leonardo da Vinci to Robert Smithson, who were 
passionately interested in science and technology. What about the first 
futurist manifesto, with its declaration that a motorcycle is more beautiful 
than the Nike of Samothrace?

What I think you've inadvertently done, Alex, is to develop a train of 
thought that sounds as if it ought to be true, and will be persuasive to many 
people for that reason.  But if one does some reality checking (by, say, 
reading about or considering  the lives of actual artists), your theses 
really need to be reconsidered. This isn't intended as a criticism, as it's 
very easy to go astray in this manner and we all do it. Just reminding the 
list, and myself, that one can't theorize in a vacuum...unless one is 
theorizing about the nature of vacuums.

pat sloane
=================================
In a message dated 5/23/00 9:33:25 AM Eastern Daylight Time, 
Alex.liddie-AT-worldnet.att.net writes:

> If "modern" life began when science began to replace religion, art, and the
>  "creative" imagination and began to foster technology and industry, which,
>  in turn, created a middle class, modernism in the arts is a reaction 
against
>  science, technology, and middle class values and styles.  Jeffrey Perl's
>  fine books and lectures (<The Tradition of Return> & <Skepticism and Modern
>  Enmity>) clearly explain the unicorns in the modernist gardens.  Modernist
>  ideology is neither, necessarily, leftist and progressive or rightist and
>  reactionary but either or both as essentially anti-bourgeoise (cf. Tom 
Wolfe
>  on <The Painted
>  Word> and <From Bauhaus to Our House>).  How many artists can you name who
>  are moderate, corporatist Republicans?  If science and technology are
>  reflections of humanity's efforts to overcome the curses of toil, pain, and
>  mortality imposed by on us by original sin, modernist artists seem
>  unappreciative of  the palliation extended.
>