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Modernism has a reputation for being a forbidding phenomenon: its visual arts disconcertingly non-representational, its literary efforts devoid of the consolations of plot and character - even its films, it's argued, fall well short of that true desideratum: entertainment.
-Will Self
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Modernism Has A Reputation For Being A

Will Self
Modernism has a reputation for being a forbidding phenomenon: its visual arts disconcertingly non-representational, its literary efforts devoid of the consolations of plot and character - even its films, it's argued, fall well short of that true desideratum: entertainment.
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Art Fall Character

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The moment in the account of adam and eve in the book of genesis is when they realize they're naked and try and cover themselves with fig leaves. that seemed to me a perfect allegory of what happened in the 20th century with regard to literary modernism. literary modernism grew out of a sense that, “oh my god! i'm telling a story! oh, that can't be the case, because i'm a clever person. i'm a literary person! what am i going to do to distinguish myself?...a lot of modernism does seem to come out of a fear of being thought an ordinary storyteller.
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The one object of fifty years of abstract art is to present art-as-art and as nothing else, to make it into the one thing it is only, separating and defining it more and more, making it purer and emptier, more absolute and more exclusive - non-objective, non-representational, non-figurative, non-imagist, non-expressionist, non-subjective. the only and one way to say what abstract art or art-as-art is, is to say what it is not.
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The kind of painting which i find exciting is not necessarily representational or non-representational, but it is musical and architectural... whether this visual relationship is slightly more or slightly less abstract is, for me, beside the point.
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After modernism, things changed. indeed, modernism sometimes seems to me like an equivalent of the fall. remember, the first thing adam and eve did when they ate the fruit was to discover that they had no clothes on. they were embarrassed. embarrassment was the first consequence of the fall. and embarrassment was the first literary consequence of this modernist discovery of the surface. "am i telling a story? oh my god, this is terrible. i must stop telling a story and focus on the minute gradations of consciousness as they filter through somebody's.
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Modernism in a way, early modernism, for instance, in pictures, was turning against perspective and europe. and all early modernism is actually from out of europe, when you think of cubism is african, is looking at africa, matisse is looking at the arabesque, oceania. europe was the optical projection that had become photography, that had become film, that became television and it conquered the world.
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Modernism in other arts brought extreme difficulty. in poetry, the characteristic difficulty imported under the name of modernism was obscurity. but obscurity could just as easily be a quality of metrical as of free verse.
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