Samuel Jay Keyser

“A sea change. A transformative change. The sister arts no longer reflecting the natural bent of shared rules but giving way to a chaos of art forms. An expression of a newfound freedom, indication of a cognitive shift.

General intelligence took over from hard-wired proclivity. It was a change of mental place, a shift in where problem solving was done, whether in making a work of art or coming up with a scientific explanation. That shift in mental activity is what we call modernism. Artists used a different part of the brain to create art.

Modernism and post-Newtonian science were both part and parcel of the same thing: the brain relinquishing natural proclivities for the products of general intelligence.

Art interpretation as the ultimate Turing test.”
― Samuel Jay Keyser, The Mental Life of Modernism: Why Poetry, Painting, and Music Changed at the Turn of the Twentieth Century