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Sebastian Smee’s Followers (53)
Sebastian Smee
More books by Sebastian Smee…
“IF THERE IS A FUNDAMENTAL difference between rivalry in the modern era and rivalry in earlier epochs, as I believe there is, it is that in the modern era artists developed a wholly different conception of greatness. It was a notion based not on the old, established conventions of mastering and extending a pictorial tradition, but on the urge to be radically, disruptively original. Where did this urge come from? It was a response, most basically, to the new conditions of life—to a sense that modern, industrialized, urban society, although in some ways representing a pinnacle of Western civilization, had also foreclosed on certain human possibilities. Modernity, many began to feel, had shut off the possibility of forging a deeper connection with nature and with the riches of spiritual and imaginative life. The world, as Max Weber wrote, had become disenchanted. Hence”
― The Art of Rivalry: Four Friendships, Betrayals, and Breakthroughs in Modern Art
― The Art of Rivalry: Four Friendships, Betrayals, and Breakthroughs in Modern Art
“In these now canonical pieces, Greenberg, following Trotsky, had insisted on the need for avant-garde art to retain its independence not only from bourgeois values, but also from explicitly leftist habits of thought: Only by retaining total independence, believed Greenberg, could art offer effective resistance to forces of standardization and control in society at large. To maintain this autonomy, he argued, progressive art had to burn away everything that was incidental to the medium itself. That meant ridding painting of its traditional preoccupation with creating illusions of three-dimensionality and depth. And it meant the end of all other gambits that were in less-than-total accord with the innate properties of the medium. The artwork, he believed, must be made to surrender to “the resistance of the medium.” To”
― The Art of Rivalry: Four Friendships, Betrayals, and Breakthroughs in Modern Art
― The Art of Rivalry: Four Friendships, Betrayals, and Breakthroughs in Modern Art
Topics Mentioning This Author
| topics | posts | views | last activity | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
The Seasonal Read...:
Completed Tasks: PLEASE DO NOT DELETE ANY POST IN THIS THREAD
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3003 | 424 | May 31, 2022 09:00PM | |
| The History Book ...: THE FRANCO-PRUSSIAN WAR (19 July 1870 – 10 May 1871) | 51 | 529 | Apr 10, 2025 06:56AM |
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