So if thats Modernism..... What is art and who decides??

Modernism was a step away from the romantic era into making art that is new and influenced by many things that were going on in the world. Technological advances played a large part in the creation of modernism. I think a modernist would respond to the question what is art and who decides by saying that art in the modern sense is something that can be based on perception. It doesn't have to be a picture of nature but rather how we see nature. It is very structural and deconstructed sometimes and may not look like what it is portraying. Modern art shows the viewer in the picture so to speak by creating something that is not only based on the actual reality but the viewers reaction to it. The people who decide are the creators who make the pieces as well as the public. Modern art takes subjects that were not previously acceptable and makes pieces about them like T.S. Elliot did. Sometimes (but not all the time) art is a reaction to the changing times and it may reflect that. However it doesn't always have to be that and there in lies the beauty of modern art.

More Modernism

In the second part of the book that we read we were taught more about modernism. One of the things that jumped out to me was the influence of primitivism. This was using African masks and other sorts of tribal things in art works. This is very modern because it is something outside of most of the people's daily lives who were using them. They were a way to show meaning without people having to draw too much of their own outside information to understand. One of the things I also liked about this was that they referenced the book Heart of Darkness, which is something that I would really like to read. I had never thought about it as a modern book so it was neat to see that in there and it has further driven my desire to read that book. Maybe that will be what I do after we read Modernism.

The Love Song

T.S. Elliot is a very modernist poet. From reading his poem entitled The Loves Song of J Alfred Prufrock, this is easy to see. Alfred writes about a character who is not fancy r rich or important. Instead he writes about an average man. This is a very modern topic because normally poets would write about a hero or some great respectable figure. Also the speaker questions life a lot in the poem and that is a very modern thing to think about. I think that it looks very different than other poems before his time. This poem deals with a subject that the older ones wouldn't.

Neitzsche, Freidrich

The vignette titled "The Parable of a Madman" written by Freidrich Neitzsche is powerful by the least. It tells the story of a madman who rushes into the marketplace early in the morning proclaiming that God is dead, and it is the people that have killed him. His works are very modernist in their ideas, as can be seen through this tale. Neitzsche is straying away from old romantic era of the beauty and sublime of nature and saying that God is dead. I think that this can be considered modern because what I think that he is trying to say that the people killed God with the new revolution and changes in the world. This is modernist in that he is taking into account the importance of the changing time and the time stream itself. And on a basic level it is modern because he is saying God is dead. That is a very disturbing thought for him time period. I am still a little confused about the ideas of modernism and think that what I have written may be completely wrong, however the one thing that is clear to me is that that story was very different than others that I have read from around the same time-period.

Modernism

I have had an introduction to modernism through reading the first 55 pages of our modernism book. It has given me some deeper understanding about what modernism is. Reading this has built onto the small intro to modernism we had in the Postmodern book. What I gathered is that modernism came about through all the changes and new-ness that was happening in the world at the time. It said that modernism is a lot about technology and revolution and the idea of time as a stream. The world was entering into modernity and this coincided with the modernism movement. One of the forerunners and most easily recognized modernist was Pablo Picasso who started painting people with exaggerated form that were very deconstructed and flat. He was also one of the first people to head the idea that for something to be modern it must have no relationship to anything outside of the thing itself. For one to gather meaning from a modern painting you need to only look at the image and not drawl from any other knowledge. This is what I found to be one of the important criteria to recognize a modern work. In the book they also talked about the idea of time being a part of something. Art was no longer about a landscape or a recreation of a space but about a moment in time. This was evident with the introduction of movie film. Most of the films were train films where the camera was placed on a train and the train was moving through time and space. All of these things are important to modernism but they are not the only things that are important as I am sure we will find out through reading the rest of the book.

So if thats postmodernism.. what is art and who decides??

We read about postmodernism so now we should have a new sense of what art is and who decides. And I would say that I do. I know now that postmodern art is about a mesh of all sorts of ideas and styles and people and places and events. It is about the coming together of everything and the movement of creating something out of other thngs. I think that this tells us that art is a collage so to say and that the people who decides are to postmodernists themselves. The modernists and the premodernist arent going to agree on what art is and what is or is not art. Because of this I think that postmodernists are the ones who decide what postmodern art is and the modernists decide what modern art is and so on and so forth. It is still a touchy subject though and I still cant completely wrap my head around all of the concepts but I think nonetheless I have gained a greater insight from reading this book.