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People esteem things, and therefore have values, regardless of their ethical theory, just like they believe things regardless of holding to a skeptical theory, because that is how we are built. Thus, it is impossible for modern art to be value free. Besides, modernism is not clearly associated with a world view. T.S. Eliot was the greatest modernist among English speaking poets, and yet he was an Anglo-Catholic and royalist. The painter Mondrian was a theosophist. Some modernists were religious seekers, some were not. Some were relatively politically conservative, and Pound became a fascist; some were Communists. What marks them out as modernists is formal experimentation and grappling with the breakdown of the old order and its certitudes under the pressure of industrialization, urbanization, and other aspects of the modern world. If you are interested in thinking about the contrast between the relatively settled world in which the majority of people still lived even as late as a hundred years ago, and the unsettlement occasioned by war, technology, mass migration, mass communications, and so forth in this century, modern art is an indispensable element for examination. However, each of us has his or her interests, so I am not trying to get you to do much of anything, just to understand a little better why some of us value modern art, even some conservatives........ |
