#modernism

If my duty to my parents is a superstition, then so is my duty to posterity. If justice is a superstition, then so is my duty to my country or my race. If the pursuit of scientific knowledge is a real value, then so is conjugal fidelity. The rebellion of new ideologies against the Tao is a rebellion of the branches against the tree: if the rebels could succeed they would find that they had destroyed themselves. ↗

— C.S. Lewis

#culture #education #modern-society #post-modernism #society

[...] a familiar art historical narrative [...] celebrates the triumph of the expressive individual over the collective, of innovation over tradition, and autonomy over interdependence. [...] In fact, a common trope within the modernist tradition of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries involved the attempt to reconstruct or recover the lost ideal of an art that is integrated with, rather than alienated from, the social. By and large, however, the dominant model of avant-garde art during the modern period assumes that shared or collective values and systems of meaning are necessarily repressive and incapable of generating new insight or grounding creative praxis. ↗

— Grant H. Kester

#art-history #assumptions #avant-garde #fallacy #meaning

A "modern" man has nothing to add to modernism, if only because he has nothing to oppose it with. The well-adapted drop off the dead limb of time like lice. ↗

— Elias Canetti

#because #dead #drop #lice #like

Postmodernism surely requires an even greater grasp of symbolism, as it's increasingly an art of gesture alone. ↗

— Andrew Eldritch

#art #even #gesture #grasp #greater

The arts generally have had to recognize Modernism - how should poetry escape? ↗

— John C. Ransom

#escape #generally #had #how #modernism

Postmodernism refuses to privilege any one perspective, and recognizes only difference, never inequality, only fragments, never conflict. ↗

— Elizabeth Wilson

#conflict #difference #fragments #inequality #never

What was true of an ancient community of Christian believers struggling with a powerful and appealing philosophy is also true for Christians in a postmodern context. Arguments that deconstruct the regimes of truth at work in the late modern culture of global capitalism are indispensable. So also is a deeper understanding of the counterideological force of the biblical tradition. But such arguments are no guarantee that the biblical metanarrative will not be co-opted for ideological purposes of violent exclusion, nor do arguments prove the truth of the gospel. Only the nonideological, embracing, forgiving and shalom-filled life of a dynamic Christian community formed by the story of Jesus will prove the gospel to be true and render the idolatrous alternatives fundamentally implausible. ↗

— Brian J. Walsh

#church #culture #postmodernism #forgiveness

I will not subscribe to the argument that ornament increases the pleasure of the life of a cultivated person, or the argument which covers itself with the words: “But if the ornament is beautiful! ...” To me, and to all the cultivated people, ornament does not increase the pleasures of life. If I want to eat a piece of gingerbread I will choose one that is completely plain and not a piece which represents a baby in arms of a horserider, a piece which is covered over and over with decoration. The man of the fifteenth century would not understand me. But modern people will. The supporter of ornament believes that the urge for simplicity is equivalent to self-denial. No, dear professor from the College of Applied Arts, I am not denying myself! To me, it tastes better this way. ↗

— Adolf Loos

#modernism #ornament #art

In our postmodern culture which is TV dominated, image sensitive, and morally vacuous, personality is everything and character is increasingly irrelevant. ↗

— David F. Wells

#culture #media #morality #personality #postmodernism

The fate of the Right in the late modern age is to destroy what remains of the past in a vain attempt to recover it. ↗

— John Gray

#politics #right #age