Modernity Flashcards
What is Modernity?
The cultural condition in which innovation becomes a necessity of life, work, and thought. The first world ideology. It is the moving away from tradition and towards what is new, and even an eye towards the future. What is new doesn’t stay new for long. This includes new ways of consumption, production, ways of thinking, seeing, improvements in technology and science, etc. Movement away from constraints put on society, such as by religion and elites.
What is modernism?
The responses of modernist artists to the forces of modernity as they try to make sense of a constantly modernizing world. These responses range across many disciplines, such as paint, architecture, literature, and music. They’re a rejection of the structured modes of expression of the pre-modern era and thus a rejection of the authority, and traditionalism; hence, an adoption of new modes of expression unconstrained by the rules of the academy, the liberation of the individual, and an engagement with modernization and the present. Sometimes even anticipation of the future.
What is primitivism?
Art that celebrates the “primal, ancestral, fertile, and regenerative.” It is closely tied to European imperialism/colonialism and the exploitation of people in Africa and South East Asia primarily. Artists often followed the same paths of soldiers to new lands or visited ethnographic museums of plundered artifacts at home in search of these particular qualities they thought had been lost in European Art. For the most part, artists lifted aspects of art that they found appealing without knowing the cultural or historical signifance of what it was they were grafting onto their work. Ironically, the primitivists look outside Western traditions of art to advance themselves in the Western tradition of art.
