Ezra Pound once remarked that artists are the “antennae of the race,” perceptive to the spirit of the age around them. Mainstream conservative commentators make the horrendous mistake of dismissing Modernist and contemporary art as “bad,” and therefore they must complain about the artwork. Yet, like they normally do, they miss the root issue of “bad” contemporary and older Modernist works. Artists take in what they see and feel around them. Disordered, nihilistic times such as ours (with, of course, some elite meddling) are invariably going to produce ugly artwork. In this regard, that is why contemporary art is important–not that I personally like most of it–but it is a touchstone for the state of our culture. Marcel Duchamp’s infamous toilet did not simply come about without social context.
When Modernist art took off after the Great War, traditional painters and artists could not Continue reading
The last few years may be, in the minds of later historians, the peak of the postmodern worldview. Postmodernism’s chief tools are irony, metafiction, and word games; to paraphrase David Foster Wallace (himself a postmodern writer) the basic premise is that we are reading a text, the text itself is aware it is a fictional story, and by extension the real world is a text we, or some authority, can manipulate. Kurt Vonnegut’s work provides a wealth of examples, particularly his narration in 
