Comment by OroPla
14 days ago
I agree that it is incredibly stupid to call something from 1870 "modern". The word modern has a a clear meaning of "just now" / "contemporary". Not two hundred years ago.
It shouldn't be attached to anything that can age out of this meaning.
The word has not only one but several clear meanings:
> In the context of art history, modernity (Fr. modernité) has a more limited sense, modern art covering the period of c. 1860–1970.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernity
The more relevant term is Modernism, which was a wave of anti-realist abstraction in the arts and sciences.
It's more than a century old now.
"Modern art" in the 1950s/60s post-war sense means extreme abstraction with no realism at all.
Ironically abstraction can work in two directions - evocative messes like Pollock, or clean geometry and abstract functionalism in design and architecture.
The CIA liked the former in art because it was bold, challenging, abrasive, and individualistic. And the artists were drunks and addicts who were easy to own.
The other direction became domestic and corporate design.
> The CIA liked the former in art because it was bold, challenging, abrasive, and individualistic.
And probably also due to it being a counterpoint to the constructivist styles that were being actively promoted by Soviet authorities at the time.
If it was clear we wouldn't be having this conversation.
It is clear, and millions of people have been using it in the way the TFA uses it, just as historians of art has used other definitions.
What it is not is obvious to derive from first principles ("says modern, so much mean current") or stuck to a single definition ("but historians call any art after the middle ages Modern").
But it is still trivial to pick the context in either use, and trivial for someone to read at least 1 paragraph about the "CIA psy-op" claim, whether it's true or not, and figure what it means by modern art there (it doesn't mean Van Gogh or Monet). People just want to comment without bothering.
On HN we could have an argument about the definition of "is".
Clinton was just ahead of the curve.
I know.
But I was trying to reach the person who left the parent comment.
And hitting them with a phrasing that is directly poststructuralist seemed to be the wrong approach since they appear to operate in a structuralist framing.
Meanwhile historians are out there, regarding things from 500 years ago as modern.
This doesn't change the meaning of the word modern, though. It just uses a different scale. The same way the Moon is "right next to" the Earth.
However, when you tie the word "new" or in this case "modern" to a time period that was over a hundred years ago you are just setting yourself up for failure and have to make do with calling things "after new" or in this case "post modern". But then where will this end?
What was wrong with calling periods proper names like Renaissance, Baroque and Romantic?
> What was wrong with calling periods proper names like Renaissance, Baroque and Romantic?
Eras only get these proper names long after they're over. To people living during those eras, they were just "now".