Modernism Ep08 ⟩ “The Future That Was”

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What is Modernism? The Final Chapter! The Future That Was; or, When the Avant-Garde Became Official Culture Comrades, we have reached the last Shock of the New, and with it the completion and assimilation of our new penetration-front into modernity’s semi-self-consciousness. We have already grown new mental organs from having dissected ourselves in the previous seven episodes. What Happened to All the Genius Art Movements? • Where are the serious tryers now? • How did anti-art come to win by default? • Those Modernist schools/cults were so inspiring and fun and world-enchanting. Why have they died out? • Is there no hope for interesting art-based world-transforming cults today? • Is the glut of shitart and the depth of cynicism past the tipping point? Hughes Tackles Jameson’s Problem! How can we build an art movement capable of effective collective-reality-tunnel reprogramming if “aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production generally”? Being materially reproduced inside the same pipelines that animate the enemy does things. Postmodernism’s formerly offensive features—including overt expressions of social and political defiance—“no longer scandalize anyone” and have instead “become institutionalized” within official Western culture. That’s already a much worse problem than censorship, as Foucault likes to always point out. The original manifesto-illuminated humanity-helping attack on shit-culture still survives perfectly well inside the art (as figure, style, attitude, etc.) but it doesn’t mess up the system! In fact, the system can circulate it and it even acts as fuel detergent. Back when it was serious, Modernism understood its formal vocation as “the resistance to commodity form, not to be a commodity”—that is, as a kind of hard but catchy and psychedelic new aesthetic language that could resist commodification, instrumentalization, digestion-away into enemy fuel. But that solution is internally contradictory and historically incapable of collective realization. Isn’t it. Late capitalism has a superpower: is metabolizes the antimatter designed to destroy it. Banning your revolutionary image or bible isn’t necessary. Preserve the image while changing its social function is evne better: print it on a T-shirt, detach it from the collective practice that gave it force, and sell the corpse back to you as lifestyle, identity, self-brand, or myth for serious fantasizing. So the MAIN main puzzle in this SERIES CLIMAX is this: • MAIN PUZZLE: How can we build an art movement capable of collective reality-reprogramming if, as Jameson says, even the forms of cultural resistance aimed against capitalism can be “secretly disarmed and reabsorbed” by it? Peak Hughes is Here! And that’s how Hughes begins! With the wonderful historical absurdity that Modernism won. The avant-garde birthed itself by structuralist self-definition—as the rejected outsider or, when properly self-aware, as irritating prophet carrying news that bourgeois culture did not want to hear. Consequently, by the 1970s, bourgeois culture cannot get enough of it. Modern art has museums, university departments, foundations, corporate patrons, government subsidy, rich collectors, an enormous explanatory bureaucracy, and a public trained to regard newness itself as evidence of seriousness. Modernism has become, as Hughes puts it, “our official culture.” So what the hell is an *avant*-garde supposed to do now? This is the real subject of the episode. Finally, a Practical Episode for Salt-of-the-Earth Folk Like Us Hey wanna-be artists, this is the practical episode! Why did the historical machine that had powered Modernism from Courbet onward, whose “logic” was: • New form F1 → scandal S1 → changed sensibility C1 → eventual assimilation A1 → still newer form F2 → scandal S2 → … Why, I say, why didn’t real art history work like that? Surprise Answer #1: Lo and behold, the hostile bourgeois is not simply the antagonist of modern ar