Ever looked at abstract art and thought “what the heck?”
Modernism: a style or movement in the arts that aims to break with classical and traditional forms.
In the 6th episode of Commerce and Culture, Paul Cantor talks about the modernism movement and some of what drove it to begin towards the end of the 19th century.
While in the past few lectures he’s been talking more about the market vs. patronage, this lecture he starts to segue into different parts of the market and a little bit of capitalism vs Marxism.
In the last post, we left off talking about the novels of the 19th century and the great success that they had. People like Charles Dickens had incredible success during that time. His novels and series style making him a millionaire.
However, there was a group of people that did not enjoy seeing this success as much as others. Poets. Before the 19th century, poems were the primary form of literature. The English novel in many ways was like a rebellion, similar to how Shakespeare’s theater was.
Cantor talks about how there were actually campaigns telling parents not to let their kids read these novels in magazines because they’ll get addicted and the reading wasn’t wholesome, etc. Very similar to what we see today with tv and smartphones. It will be interesting to see what this looks like in another 200 years.
Even though poets had a large amount of success in the 19th century, they had nowhere near the success that the novel did. This is one of the things about capitalism. It guarantees lots of wealth but it doesn’t spread it around equally.
They became quite envious of the success of the novelists. These poets and artists who didn’t have the success that others did felt like the market had betrayed them. This was the beginning of the modernist movement. They started being different simply for the sake of being different
It sounds extreme, but they basically started this idea that If the art succeeds, it’s because it’s bad. If it’s rejected, it’s because it’s good. This sounds completely backward and ridiculous, but this was actually a movement that took off. The more difficult, the more incomprehensible, the better the art is.
In paintings, we saw this with abstract art. Making things completely random. “It’s just so difficult and incomprehensible that you can’t understand my art. Because of that, it’s really good.” In music, we heard extremely complicated, very odd sounds. Think Arnold Schoenberg.
Canter says: “Modernism is not anti-commercial because it’s rebellious, it’s rebellious because at its heart it’s ant-commercial.” I basically take this as, it’s bad art that no one likes, so they have to pretend they’re rebellious before people will think that it’s cool.
All of this is not saying that no art form of modernism can be good. Simply that, the fact it’s different doesn’t make it good. In the same way, just because something is popular that doesn’t mean it’s good. It must be decided by the customers individually what is liked and what isn’t.