The Enlightenment (appr ) "The Age of Reason" Rationalism, "Truth"/ Universality (example: René Descartes)

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1 par a digm noun Pronunciation: 'par-&-"dim also -"dim Etymology: Late Latin paradigma, from Greek paradeigma, from paradeiknynai to show side by side, from para- + deiknynai to show -- more at DICTION Date: 15th century 1 : EXAMPLE, PATTERN; especially : an outstandingly clear or typical example or archetype 2 : an example of a conjugation or declension showing a word in all its inflectional forms 3 : a philosophical and theoretical framework of a scientific school or discipline within which theories, laws, and generalizations and the experiments performed in support of them are formulated - par a dig mat ic /"par-&-dig-'ma-tik/ adjective - par a dig mat i cal ly /-ti-k(&-)le/ adverb

2 The Enlightenment (appr ) "The Age of Reason" Rationalism, "Truth"/ Universality (example: René Descartes) Faith in science and the scientific method (example: Isaac Newton)

3 Commager: Characteristics of the Enlightenment: 1)Faith in Nature and in Reason 2)Passion for order regulating almost every form of expression 3) Commitment to freedom of the mind

4 Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment (1790) Definition of Beauty derived from the first moment. Taste is the faculty of estimating an object or a mode of representation by means of a delight or aversion apart from any interest. The object of such a delight is called beautiful.... Definition of the beautiful drawn from the second moment. The beautiful is that which, apart from concept, pleases universally.

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8 Characteristics of Modernism: 1. Optimism with regard to technology 2. Uniqueness of the individual: creativity, originality, and artistic genius 3. Respect for originality and authenticity (belief in the "masterpiece") 4. Favoring abstract over narrative, historical or political content 5. Disdain for kitsch and middle-class values and sensibilities 6. Awareness of the art market: art as object, commodity [from Terry Barrett, Criticizing Art, Understanding the Contemporary (Mountain View, CA: Mayfield Publishing Company, 1994).]

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10 "A house has to fulfill two purposes. First, it is a machine for living in, that is, a machine to provide us with efficient help for speed and accuracy in our work, a diligent and helpful machine which should satisfy all our physical needs: comfort. But it should also be place conducive to meditation, and, lastly, a beautiful place, bringing much needed tranquility to the mind." - Le Corbusier

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12 The Five Points of a New Architecture - the masterly, correct and magnificent play of volumes brought together in light Le Corbusier (1926) 1. The use of columns to raise the house off the ground, freeing the sire for the circulation of people and cars, emphasizing the cubic nature of the building by enabling the underside of the first floor slab to be seen and eliminating a basement 2. Developing the flat roof as a roof-garden, recovering the ground lost by building the house and making a private outdoor space for sunbathing, exercise, or taking the view

13 3. Exploiting the freedom created by the structural frame to position partitions where required what he called the free plan 4. Glazing, infilling or omitting the non-load-bearing external walls to create privacy, windows, or open terraces as desired the free façade 5. Using a long horizontal window to give even and generous lighting [from Richard Weston, Modernism (London: Phaidon Press, 1996).]

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17 Fried s three propositions describing the "war" between "theater" and modernist art: 1. The success, even the survival, of the arts has come increasingly to to depend on their ability to defeat theater 2. Art degenerates as it approaches the condition of theater 3. The concepts of quality and value and to the extent that these are central to art, the concept of art itself are meaningful or wholly meaningful, only within the individual arts. What lies between is theater "

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22 "More soberly, the seasoned serious photographer knows that his work can and must contain four basic qualities - basic to the special medium of camera lens chemical and paper: (1) absolute fidelity to the medium itself, that is, frill and frank and pure utilisation of the camera as the great, the incredible instrument of symbolic actuality that it is; (2) complete realisation of natural, uncontrived lighting; (3) rightness of in-camera view-finding or framing (the operator's correct, and crucial definition of his picture borders) (4) general but unobtrusive technical mastery." Walker Evans, Photography (1969)

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32 ...with the entrance of the avant-garde, a second new cultural phenomenon appeared in the industrial West: that thing to which the Germans give the wonderful name of Kitsch: popular, commercial art and literature with their chromeotypes, magazine covers, illustrations, ads, slick and pulp fiction, comics, Tin Pan Alley music, tap dancing, Hollywood movies, etc., etc.... Kitsch is a product of the industrial revolution which urbanized the masses of Western Europe and America ad established what is called universal literacy.

33 Kitsch is mechanical and operates by formulas. Kitsch is vicarious experience and faked sensations. Kitsch changes according to style, but remains always the same. Kitsch is the epitome of of all that is spurious in the life of our times. Kitsch pretends to demand nothing of its customers except their money--not even their time.

34 There has always been on one side the minority of the powerful--and therefore the cultivated--and on the other the great mass of the exploited and poor--and therefore the ignorant. Formal culture has always belonged to the first, while the last have had to content themselves with folk or rudimentary culture, or kitsch.

35 Clement Greeberg, Avant-garde and Kitsch (1939)... the true and most important function of the avant-garde was... to find a path along which it would be possible to keep culture moving in the midst of ideological confusion and violence. Retiring from public altogether, the avant-garde poet or artist sought to maintain the high level of his art by both narrowing and raising its expression of an absolute in which all relativities and contradictions would be either resolved or beyond the point. Art for art s sake and pure poetry appear, and subject matter or content becomes something to be avoided like the plague.

36 The avant-garde poet or artist tries in effect to imitate God by creating something valid solely on its own terms, in the way nature itself is valid, in the way a landscape--not its picture--is aesthetically valid; something given, increate, independent of meanings, similars or originals. Content is to be dissolved so completely into form that the work of art or literature canot be reduced in whole or in part to anything not itself.

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48 Characteristics of Modernism: 1. Optimism with regard to technology 2. Uniqueness of the individual: creativity, originality, and artistic genius 3. Respect for originality and authenticity (belief in the "masterpiece") 4. Favoring abstract over narrative, historical or political content 5. Disdain for kitsch and middle-class values and sensibilities 6. Awareness of the art market: art as object, commodity [from Terry Barrett, Criticizing Art, Understanding the Contemporary (Mountain View, CA: Mayfield Publishing Company, 1994).]

49 From the beginning, the successes of modernism have been neither to affirm nor to refuse its concrete position in the social order, but to represent that position in its contradiction, and so act out the possibility of critical consciousness in general. [Crow]

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51 The distinctive point of view and iconographic markers of the subculture came to be drawn from a repertoire of objects, locations and behaviors supplied by other colonists of the same social spaces. Avant-garde opposition was and is drawn out of inarticulate and unresolved dissatisfactions with those spaces, though designed to contain them, also put on display. [Crow]

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53 "Art is not a form of propaganda, it is a form of truth In free society art is not a weapon and it does not belong to the sphere of polemics and ideology. It may be different elsewhere. But democratic society--in it--the highest duty of the writer, the composer, the artist, is to remain true to himself and let the chips fall where they may." President John F. Kennedy, 1963

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