I want to replace reddit.com/r/modernart with a Lemmy version and I otherwise only have a Lemmy.ml account. I’d prefer to keep the community on Hexbear. There isn’t really a community on reddit to migrate and I doubt anyone would join Hexbear for it, I just want to better focus the core idea of it here.
Modernism is super relevant to the left, but it isn’t well-represented by /c/art or /c/urbanism or /c/literature or /c/music or /c/history since it’s a whole-ass thing in itself. I want it to be posts like this where there’s a background and discussion for specific 1860s-1960s works/buildings/ideas/movements, how they made the 20th century different from the 19th, and how that informed their/our politics: https://www.reddit.com/r/modernart/comments/tlxspt/ee_cummings_next_to_of_course_god_america_i/
Postmodernism is a CIA psyop. RETVRN TO MODERN.
Postmodernism is, in its negative way, a ruthlessly ‘totalizing’ system, which forecloses a vast range of critical thought and emancipatory politics—and its closures are final and decisive. — Ellen Meiksins Wood
That’s the big value of knowing modernism. We live under postmodernism to such an extensive degree that there’s a postmodernist realism in the way capitalist realism exists. Modernism showed us how to undo the past, attack the present, and build a cohesive picture of a future which countered all of the things that became postmodernism. What they were doing in the 1910s-30s, in response to living under similar conditions to ours, was an intellectual trend that has been lost to time through decades of suppression and recuperation.
When people have a good sense of how radical a thing like dada or art nouveau or constructivism or social realism can be and how we’ve naively replicated those things, there’s a good foundation for presenting a real socialist aesthetic movement. Whether that’s how we use the dadaist absurdism in our memes to attack illegitimate things, how goblincore adopts art nouveau’s principles to counter commodification, or how constructivism drove a lot of what we now consider left-urbanist ideas, it’s a history we should know.
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