Mary Rose’s Reviews > Has Modernism Failed? > Status Update

"Only with hindsight can we now see that tradition and authority may be necessary, even to make a genuine avant-garde possible—in order to provide something to revolt against. […] The artist finds himself under continuous pressure to be modern, but discovers that to be modern now is to be traditional […] Artists are finding that the only way to make something new is to borrow from the past."

“Modernism has thrown up many aggressively absurd forms of art that simply cannot be understood outside their corrosive relation to the contradictions that capitalist society poses for the artist: namely, the fact that art’s value tends to be defined, not by its spiritual, intellectual, or emotional content, but by its economic worth.”