Modernism is no longer “modern.” Duchamp was born in the 19th century and the Mona Lisa moustache artist is several generations closer in time to Byron than he is to us.
But the legacy of modernism, with its self-conscious -isms, grows apace: ungainly poetry the public ignores continues to flourish, aided by institutional subsidy.
The New English Review published an article last year, “The Tyranny of Artistic Modernism,” by Mark Signorelli and Nikos Salingaros, and was rebuked in First Things by Maureen Mullarkey: “Beckmann’s Deposition, A Modernist Offering.”
It is nice to know these sorts of discussions are going on, for Modernism’s profound influence is taken too much for granted. Here is Signorelli’s reply to Mullarkey.
Compare the two paintings in Mullarkey’s article: the one by Max Beckmann (1917) and the one by Geerhaert David (1500).
The models speak for themselves.
Rhetoric of a certain religious or political bent need not distract us. Artistic Modernism is too important an issue to be sidetracked by religious or political wrangling, and it is precisely this wrangling, which, by its very nature, is nearly always beside the point, that helps to keep the legacy of Modernism afloat.
The cry against Modernism could be any of the following: “God has gone out of art!” or “It is as if God, if there were a God, had gone out of art!” Or, “Beauty has gone out of art!” Or, “Art now sucks!” The rhetoric may be different, but the truth is the same.
Now, we will not deny that Modernism has a certain powerful secular, scientific, open-minded, progressive perception among many intellectuals, and that complaints against Modernism tend to be construed as nothing more than a sort of superstitious “yahoo” reaction.
But Modernism lacks genuine scientific credentials: Cubism is not a “fourth dimension” or a “new reality.” Poems cannot be measured by “breaths” or “fields of energy” or “things.” Also, many of Modernism’s founders were fascists. Modernism’s heady, positive, scientific “perception” is largely a p.r. gimmick.
Modernism’s p.r. perception, however, is fading, as minds secular and religious are getting fed up with what has been to a large extent, a narrow, anti-human, anti-art, con.
Why a “con?” Real simple: Because 20th century art was a profitable style based on cheap materials (Bauhaus cement) and hyped painting (buy Cezanne/Matisse/Picasso low, sell high) with an accompanying apparatus of critics, lawyers, speculators, art leagues, schools, and galleries, each part validating the other.
Poetry was the intellectual con that abutted the profit con (architecture, painting). The arts tend to pull along together: think Keats and Mozart; then Pound and Picasso. There’s an intellectual/artistic sea that catches up all swimmers.
On a more practical level, however: the modern art collector and lawyer, John Quinn, changed import law (in US Congress!) to make the modern art Armory Show (1913) happen—Quinn also negotiated Eliot and Pound’s “Waste Land” deal. The wildly influential modern art critic John Dewey allowed wealthy modern art collector A.C. Barnes to co-write his famous Art and Experience. The poetry clique of Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, WC Williams, and Louis Ginsberg (Allen Ginsberg’s father) was headed up by another wealthy modern art collector, Walter Arensberg, who hosted Duchamp’s first visit to America. Duchamp advised Peggy Guggenheim, who hung out with Ashbery and O’Hara. William James, the nitrous oxide professor, taught Gertrude Stein at Harvard; Stein’s poetry was less important than the modern art collecting she and her brother Leo did.
Knowing the history and persons does open up our eyes, but we don’t have to waste time with shallow, abstract, ideology, or do a lot of historical second-guessing. To repeat: the art, the models, speak for themselves.
The public is no longer interested in poetry, at least since the death of Frost 50 years ago. Today, free verse poets like Billy Collins and Mary Oliver sell a little bit, but they are not critically esteemed. Poetry is a fractured, mostly ignored enterprise.
Novels still sell, but poems do not.
In our previous post, we pointed out the crucial difference between fiction and poetry: the public has a certain amount of patience for novels—readers will “stick with” a novel for a “pay-off;” poems are not given the same chance—and this is due to an old (and correct) expectation that poems should please us immediately.
A novel may be hard to “get into,” and even appear to be an ugly mess, at first, but readers will stay with it because they assume that the total effect will eventually please them.
Modern poets stubbornly believe readers will “give poems the same chance” they do novels.
They won’t. Public perception of modern poems as compared to modern novels will always operate in the following way:
The consumer’s choice is simple:
Poems are no longer beautiful things which please immediately, but instead imitate the prosy nature of novels,
So what does that mean? It means the buyer has two choices: the novel—an ugly bird who can fly a long way or, the poem—an ugly bird who can only fly a short distance. In terms of bang for their buck, the consumer is always going to choose the bird that can fly a greater distance.
No wonder the novel out-sells the poem.
We’ve all seen the poets who try some new trick, who try to make the poem into something it isn’t: an offensive joke, a dense nugget packed with topical information, a pictogram, a revolutionary tract, a diary, but this just makes the poet look desperate: it never works. The clever poet thinks, Look, I am not only giving them a poem, I am giving them a joke, too! The public is not interested. The public just thinks: if you don’t like poetry, why are you pretending to write it? Write a novel or a joke, instead.
Poetry may be dead, but the idea of it still lives.
Modernism couldn’t kill that.
