2 hours ago, RomanticRealism said:
Modernists are out to destroy art. They are nihilists -
It’s more complicated that. And my saying so does in no way imply that I endorse the motives of the Modernists. Just the opposite. But just claiming that “they are nihilists” doesn’t make it so. And furthermore, if you DID understand Modernism, you would better understand Objectivism and it’s position on Art.
You many have heard the term Bauhaus. It’s typically associated with architecture, but it also encompassed all the arts. It developed hand-in-hand with Positivism/Logical Positivism - something which Rand stood in direct opposition. Logical Positivism had (and continues to have) a major influence on psychology (behaviorism), politics, philosophy, linguistics, mathematics, etc.
Here is a pretty good paper on the issue (I haven’t read the entire paper) but it took me about 2 sec. to find one on the internet that demonstrates a fair understanding of the roots of Modernism. (The names of Carnap, Neurath, Wittgenstein are major players in the philosophy of the first half of the 20th. Century, and if you are interested in philosophy, it would be useful to understand some history).
Some excerpts:
On 15 October 1929, Rudolf Carnap, a leading member of the recently founded Vienna Circle, came to lecture at the Bauhaus in Dessau, southwest of Berlin. Carnap had just finished his magnum opus, The Logical Construction of the World, a book that immediately became the bible of the new antiphilosophy announced by the logical positivists.
Any attempt to link philosophy and art in the interwar period must go further than merely identifying parallelisms between movements. In fact, core members of the logical positivist and Bauhaus groups selfconsciously sought to articulate a view of the world in which both would play essential roles. Though on opposite political poles of the Vienna Circle, the philosophers Otto Neurath and Ludwig Wittgenstein each spent years pursuing architectural concerns. Throughout their writings Carnap, Neurath, and others singled out modern architecture as the cultural movement with which they most identified
From simple observation reports (“protocol statements”) and logical connectives (such as “if/then,” “or,” “'and”), the logical positivists sought to ground a “scientific,” antiphilosophical philosophy that would set all reliable knowledge on strong foundations and isolate it from the unreliable. Since all valid inferences would be built out of these basic statements, the sciences would be unified by their shared starting points. For their part, the Bauhaiusler hoped to use scientific principles to combine primitive color relations and basic geometrical forms to eliminate the decorative and create a new antiaesthetic aesthetic that would prize functionality. So close had the two groups come in their shared vision of modernism that, when the Bauhaus reconvened as the New Bauhaus in Chicago after fleeing the Nazis, the New Bauhaus imported the Vienna Circle’s logical positivism as a fundamental component of its basic design program.
_Neurath’s scientism -his faith in the neutral, binding threads of statistics, physics, and logic- was key to the consolidation of the Verein Ernst Mach. But even as the Verein was in its infancy, Neurath continued his “unpolitical” technical social work and revealed a deep interest in workers’ housing, art, and architecture. For Neurath, mass accommodation had several important political functions: it met the immediate material needs of the workers; it encouraged a collective form of life; and it served to build, sector by sector, Neurath’s ultimate goal of full socialization of the economy. By the early 1920s Neurath had become a central figure in the housing movements in and around Vienna, drawing him into the circle of politically engaged modern artists and architects. _
With the move to Dessau and pressure from various sides, including the spartan geometrists of the De Stijl, the Bauhaiusler began a profound shift away from the mystical and toward the streamlined and industrial. This change was surely reinforced by the presence in Dessau of the big industrial concerns of Agfa, the Junkers aircraft plant, and factories for the production of gas and chemicals. Reflecting the new priorities, the teaching staff of the Dessau Bauhaus altered their titles from “masters” to “professors,” and replaced graphic design with advertising. Their espousal of everything technical and scientific became ever more pronounced; art would act like science and serve as an initiator in the cycle of industrial production.10 Nothing pleased Neurath more than this new, scientific turn. When the Dessau Bauhaus opened in December 1926, Neurath was there, and he wrote about the occasion in the journal Der AuJbau. Celebrating the renunciation of ornamentation and decoration of every sort, he gently chided the Bauhaus for relying too much on the style of modernism and not sufficiently on its practical implications: “When will the modern engineers run the Bauhaus?” Insofar as the Bauhaus followed a technical, socially driven agenda, Neurath believed, it would serve the great revolution associated with the new form of societal and personal life [Neugestaltung des gesellschaftlichen und personlichen Lebens]. Since he believed that “artists were leading the battle for a spiritual liberation from the past,” the Bauhaus’s cultural role could not have been greater." This, in the end, was for Neurath the real import of the Bauhaus. Anyone wanting to “enter the promised land” liberated from the past"will seize upon the formation of the new form of life [Gestaltung des Lebens] as a technical achievement. This is the thrust of the Bauhaus, unfettering the liveliest discussion, and most vigorous efforts on all sides"
This was all part of the larger trend of “social conditioning” and “social engineering” or creating the New Man and worked hand in hand with Behaviorism and the ideas behind atonality in music. And while you may not find any of this interesting (I doubt you were taught it in college - I know I wasn’t), it’s important in helping to understanding the broader historical context in which Rand formed Objectivism.
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