Sam

Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism

Downward and decadent modern literature, modern art, artists, Picasso, Cocteau, Man Kandinsky, Chagall, Klee, Marquet, Apollinaire, Isherwood, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Braque, poetry and poets, classifying personality, intelligible conversation, genuine thought, histories, cultures, philosophies, religion, Ancient Greece, Ancient Persia, Ancient Egypt, Mid Century Modern Design, Bauhaus, Pierre Koenig, Harry Seidler, John Lautner, Ray & Charles Eames, Joseph Eichler, Louis Kahn, Rudolph M. Schindler, Le Corbusier, Eero Aarnio, Mies Van Der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright, Julius Schulman, Richard Neutra, Eero Saarinen, Alvar Aalto, Castiglioni, Middle Eastern music & culture, Fauvism, Analytical Cubism, Synthetic Cubism, Dadaism, Surrealism, Futurism.

Existentialism attempts to describe our desire to make rational decisions despite existing in an irrational universe. Unfortunately, life might be without inherent meaning (existential atheists) or it might be without a meaning we can understand (existential theists). Either way, the human desires for logic and immortality are futile. We are forced to define our own meanings, knowing they might be temporary. In this existence The Individual Defines Everything. We are what we can become. Ours is a process, and our becoming is our ontic possibility of becoming. Human existence is a project, in which past and present are subordinate to future, is the main residence of our existence, because it is the north of our projection of ourselves. So do not ask me about me, I will have changed tomorrow, or you can ask me everyday?

Cubism introduced a new way to visualize the world, which is not using the eye but the mind to view the world. Apollinaire defined Cubism as the "art of painting original arrangements composed of elements taken from conceived rather than perceived reality". Picasso, Braque & Gris splintered the visual world not wantonly, but sensuously and beautifully with their new art. They provided what we could almost call a God's-eye view of reality: every aspect of the whole subject, seen simultaneously in a single dimension.

Dada is a state of mind. That is why it transforms itself according to races and events. Dada applies itself to everything, and yet it is nothing, it is the point where the yes and the no and all the opposites meet, not solemnly in the castles of human philosophies, but very simply at street corners, like dogs and grasshoppers.

"Je suis l'Empire a la fin de la decadence" A naive view is that if a society is decadent then, writers expressing it are decadent. It should say a decadent society poses new problems for a writer. "Can art be decadent?... yes, but only if judged by its own artistic criteria. Sadly l'art pour l'art or art for art's sake becomes art for money's sake. True art and ideology are mutually exclusive. Belief in indefinite progressive decadence in the past was accidental phenomenon. A profuse use of description. Prominence of detail, elevation of imaginative power. Lose sight of reason, the dangerously deceptive character of decadent art is the power to seduce.

My view is than an artistic and literary protest against a spiritually bankrupt civilization is needed! A person's or group's self-understanding is not viewed as reliable knowledge, because it is distorted by psychological delusion, perspectival illusion, and ideological prejudice. Life itself is a work of art!