The Tyranny of Modernism

Mark Anthony Signorelli and Nikos A. Salingaros, writing for New English Review, provide a brilliantly eloquent dismantling of the very essence of modernism across all of the arts:

We who live in the Western world at the present time continue to suffer under the reign of a great tyranny — the tyranny of artistic modernism. The modernist aesthetic, which dominates our age, takes a variety of forms in the respective arts — in architecture, a lack of scale and ornamentation combined with the overwhelming deployment of materials like glass, steel, and brutalist concrete; in the plastic arts, a rejection of natural forms mixed with an unmistakable tendency towards the repulsive or meretricious; in literature, non-linear narrative, esoteric imagery, and an almost perfect lack of poetic form and diction. Yet common now to the practice of all these arts are certain primal impulses which may be said to form the core of the modernist aesthetic — a hostility and defiance towards all traditional standards of excellence, discovered over millennia of craftsmanship and reflection; a notion of the artist’s freedom as absolute, and entirely divorced from the ends of his art; and, as Roger Scruton has so clearly demonstrated, a refusal to apply the category of beauty to either the creation or the estimation of artwork. Standing behind this aesthetic is an ideology supported by nearly the entire institutional structure of the Western world — the universities, the publishing houses, the galleries, the journals, the prize committees, the zoning boards. Books that evince a fidelity to modernist principles are the ones that get published. Buildings that conform to the brutal codes of modernism and its derivatives are the ones that get built. Whatever creative efforts spring from other sources of inspiration other than modernist aggression are invariably ignored and dismissed as something antiquated or reactionary. This is the great totalitarian system of our times — the dictatorship of modernism.

Included in this scathing critique of modernism in all its forms are some particularly harsh words for architecture:

To the contrary, modern art betrays a pursuit not of harmony, but of domination — domination of nature, of language, of one’s fellow man. The level of stylistic violence implicit in modernist architecture is extraordinary: overhangs without obvious supports, leaning buildings, extremely sharp edges sticking out to threaten us, glass floors over heights leading to vertigo, tilted interior walls also leading to vertigo and nausea. Look at the horizontal windows of modernist buildings that violate the vertical axis defined by gravity, or the “brutalist” exposed concrete in dangerously rough surfaces — a violence against the tactile environment, often falsely excused as being “honest” rather than a sadistic architectural expression. The “milder” forms of this violence are represented in minimalist environments devoid of all signs of life: totally blank walls, windowless façades, curtain glass walls, buildings as cubes of glass, buildings as cubes of smooth concrete, etc. Indeed, the subtlety that earlier attempted to camouflage this intrinsic violence has finally been abandoned, and buildings are now built as if blown apart, dismembered, and their forms melted.

I thought this section laying bare the elitism of the arts was particularly salient:

The public is normally revolted by such artistic violence, which is why its propagandists call out constantly and hysterically for more “education,” by which they mean brainwashing, intended to bully ordinary people into accepting these perversions. Indeed, the modernists’ almost complete take-over of the schools has been the single most important factor in the triumph of their style; witness the architecture schools, where only a handful of programs in the entire world dare to teach design on traditional principles. Modernism’s project of domination, control, and destruction has naturally attracted persons who crave power, and who master all the techniques for achieving power and dominance over others. It should be no wonder, therefore, that a dominant elite producing and promoting an art of hatred controls the market today. A “new normal” has been imposed, according to which the most unnatural — or rather, anti-natural — of styles has been exalted. What is worse, the classical styles have been represented as aberrant; the pursuit of beauty or harmony has become the gravest crime an artist could commit. Poets who attempt to write in structured form are attacked as “fascists.” Architects who employ the design vocabulary of pre-modern traditions are dismissed as “reactionaries.” The propaganda machine of modernism has been so successful that we now witness the complete inversion of artistic standards.

The notion that the public needs to be educated on matters of aesthetics is elitist and offensive. Beauty is universal. To appreciate beauty is to be human.

Why does this matter? It is, after all, just the arts. If the whole of the arts are taken over by modernist elites, does it make a difference to the rest of us?

This is not about aesthetics but civilization itself. We are watching the increasingly rapid dissolution of civil society on all sides of us — the failure of our schools, a breakdown of the family, the degradation of language, the abandonment of polite manners, the rape of the environment, and the replacement of a stable economy with a torrent of dangerous speculation. We do not give sufficient consideration to how far the depravity of contemporary art may be implicated in this catastrophic decline. Nothing is so important to the spiritual and mental flourishing of a people as its art. The stories they tell, the buildings they inhabit, the public spaces in which they gather, the songs they sing, the fashioned images they gaze upon — these things shape their souls more permanently and effectively than anything else. We live in a time when the art all around us accustoms men to, and insinuates into their souls, the most erroneous and degrading ideas imaginable about themselves and their world. A humane society can hardly be expected to grow out of such an adverse cultural environment.

Whether you agree or disagree with the reach of their conclusion or the stance of the article, I think that the points made are valuable and deserve to be considered. Modernism is, by its very nature, antithetical to the preceding thousands of years of artistic tradition. Many modernists don’t themselves realize that the new tradition of modernism was born out of a rejection of the principles of the past. This is partly the point of my previous post, Of Time and Place where I posited that many who suggest that art should be “of today” have a fundamental misunderstanding of the birth of modernism. At least recognizing that the two traditions are at odds is a first step.