Modenisms carcass

Hey Funk,

I’m glad your idea of a blog goes a bit more hand in hand with mine in the sense that it should be a forum for open discussion instead of a place for one-time postings followed by nothingness and quiet.
For me, modernism refers to the period that spans from the end of the 19th century and the middle of the 20th. Some of the characteristics of it that I consider dead and gone are the idealism of a perfect humanity, the belief in a essence and the blind trust that they had in the idea that through rational management and a controlled development of new technologies we could achieve a better world. In the political arena, modernism created capitalism, which worked out great… for a while. Also, the great debates had to do with that evil communism that could somehow take over the world. Last but not least, artists in all fields began to run away from uniformity as if it was the plague.
This is the way I see things now: we know that a perfect society is a total impossibility (well, maybe not all of us think that but you get the idea), the idea of essences was killed by philosophers as they aimed their guns at God and we have found out (and it has been pointed out by Baudrillard, Fukuyama, Díaz, Abril and, to a certain degree, Negroponte) that there is a very, very evil (yes, I’m a complete Apocalyptic) side to the non-stop development of technology. The political arena? Well, you know a ton about it and I don’t think it usually brings a smile to your lips.
Finally, artists are now nothing but replaceable, recyclable and hollow products of models, making uniformity the undisputable King of Everything.
So, as you see, I really do believe that modernism is dead, even if we still study what was produced in that very-positive era. We also study the Incas, Mayas and Egyptians, the dinosaurs, Cervantes, Blake and Byron… and we consider them to be very, very dead.
Alright, hope to see you all in class and please, lets all follow Marcus’s lead!