Re: Modernism
Hi Giles,
I’m not sure, really. It depends on what you set up as “modernism” doesn’t it and how you define the avant-garde, Dave’s got his take of small places. I’d say they were large places which we’ve now come to recognise. Though I think there are important issues surrounding what we permit to be avant. So often it’s determined by textual practice, but content/subject/object can be avant, a voice can be avant, especially if it represents something that we’ve never heard before. Innovation isn’t purely textual, is it. I mean to say, perhaps the single greatest innovation of the last decade is the democratisation of the arts through the internet. We realise that it isn’t about a few “chosen” people controlling as Dave rightly indicates, but about means of production, and access to audience or readership. It’s too early to write more fully or cogently on this. The economy of the arts has shifted and the policing has moved from the critic/owner to the consumer. The plurality of modernism isn’t one of cultural sequences in wealth distribution, and it’s arguable whether certain societies are more advanced than others. I don’t know of an accurate measure of that. ;-)
Very best
Chris
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From: Giles Goodland <[log in to unmask]>
Reply-To: [log in to unmask]
Date: Sun, 7 May 2006 16:40:14 EDT
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Modernism
Hi Chris
Your point reminds me of some discussions I was having years ago in a cultural theory discussion group, I think we had been reading Peter Burger's book on the Avant-Garde, and we floated around the idea that the modernist 'moment' was one that came to all cultures eventually, at a certain stage of development, eg in the West concurrent with the upheavals that led to the Russian Revolution, in Latin America with Magic Realism coming at a stage of political struggle that ended with so many defeated revolutions, it seems a bit deterministic now, but I think it must be true that as a middle class faced a more literate and intelligent working class (as the western bourgeoisie did at the end of the Nineteenth century) it started to question itself and its culture more. Are we seeing a similar change now as the late nineteenth century change to mass literacy, in which access to the media (as incarnated in the internet) widens culturally and around the world? Such a cultural change would take the form of an explosion of the 'established' popular media, such as TV and newspapers, just as old modernism broke up the novel, poetry, etc. Just a thought.
Giles
