Peter Edman
Daniel Henninger’s February 18, 2005 “Wonderland” column from OpinionJournal.com was recently brought to my attention. It definitely is worth a read.
“21st Century Art Makes Its Escape From the Toilet: We don’t need Modernism and Post-Modernism anymore.” Artists and art patrons of the world: please lend this man your ears for a few minutes.
What we need is an art, a culture, an aesthetic appropriate to the age in which we live--the 21st century, the Age of the Digital and the Age of September 11. Modern art isn’t it.
Modernism was a reaction to the industrial age or the machine age. It produced Cubism, Stravinsky’s music and James Joyce’s Ulysses (also voted the 20th century’s most important novel by a panel of the Modern Library). Its most important cultural values included discordance, challenge, collision, violation, confusion. This is wholly out of sync with what people want or need in the current age.
He has a suggestion for a positive way forward, and a recognition of and appreciation for the iPod.
To see what our age needs, go to Rome. Rome was the next leg on my European trip--six days of swimming across the church façades of Borromini and Bramante (whose architecture originated in what he discovered in the ancient Roman ruins), the garden frescoes from Augustan villas on the walls of the Palazzo Massimo, the mammoth marble raiment on Bernini’s tomb for Pope Alexander VII in St. Peter’s.
The 21st-century need that one finds here is not merely beauty. Beauty still sits in the eye of the beholder, and the 20th century produced much that is beautiful. What one finds in Rome are the aesthetic values of the High Renaissance--proportion, harmony and balance. What that produces--so different than Duchamp’s influence--is what we need: Respite.
Gleanings, Arts and Culture, Science and Technology, Mon 13 Jun 2005
The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less.
Václav Havel
