The Features of Modernism

After reflection on a variety of art (and would-be art), I am led to the conclusion that modernism can be summed up as art that displays most or all of the following characteristics:

1. Rejectionism: Rejection of whatever values are associated with the forms of art that were dominant before modernism started, and signalling that rejection in the work (e.g., uglifying, to signal rejection of the ideal of beauty).

2. Primitivism: Copying or being inspired by what used to be known as primitive art (especially what is nowadays called tribal art, but also folk art, medieval art, children's art, and "outsider" art), including mimicking the technical standards of that art.

3. Individualism: Giving great importance to the development of a signature style that seeks to be instantly recognizable as belonging to the artist who made the work, generally with the idea that the signature style conveys something important about the artist, whose individuality is thereby expressed. Often, the style is the product of a novel procedure.

4. Formalism: Placing emphasis on the form or mode of presentation rather than content, so that it becomes more important that, for instance, a work is made from an unusual plastic material, than that it depicts Diana at her bath.

5. Cynicism: Avoiding cheery, optimistic sentiments and uplifting sentiments in favour of presenting moods of anger, fear, satire, despair, or cold detachment.

All works in the modernist tradition, I think, exhibit at least three of these traits, and nearly all exhibits at least four, and that goes for work that is usually discussed under the headings "post-modern", "conceptualist", or "contemporary", and thus not typically counted as modernist, just as much as works of cubism and expressionism. Conversely, it would be rare for something that did not count as modernist, conceptualist or "contemporary" to show three of the above traits.

I think, on the basis that the works have the above traits in common, that the distinction between "modernist" and "contemporary" is a distinction without a difference, and that all those works belong under the same heading. Everything on display in a typical "contemporary art" institution will have the above traits, as will works that are counted as examples of "early modernism" or "high modernism". There's also a mindset shared between the earliest modernist and the latest contemporary-, er, -ist.

The thinking is always rejectionist, which is to say, it always insists on emphatically separating itself from a rival set of values that is allegedly (by contrast with itself) mainstream, "bourgeois", conservative, conventional and, of course, moribund. It is modernist in that it insists on its newness. It claims to have made an important break with the past through innovation. It is avant-gardist in that it insists that it is at the forefront of some metaphorical marching army that is going somewhere. Where it is going, and why it is going there, is never clear. Innovation is the highest value of this kind of art. Nothing can be better than to be radically innovative, and nothing worse than to fail to innovate (and thus be "derivative"). There doesn't have to be any reason for the innovation. Innovation is an end in itself.

That's modernism, as I see it, and it's very different from anything else called art. In particular, no other art ever placed such great emphasis on innovation. In general, by contrast with modernism, innovation has only been valued when it served some other purpose (e.g., a technical innovation that enhances realism or beauty) and following tradition was often valued much more highly.

I realise that it is unusual to insist that "modernism", "contemporary art" and "conceptualism" are really all the same movement, and that the usual distinction between them is not real, but that's where my reflections have led me, so that's where I go. I don't mind if you call me a contrarian. It woudn't be the first time.