Marshall Berman, All that is Solid Melts into AIr

“To be modern is to be part of a universe in which, as Marx said, ‘all that is solid melts into air’… To be modern is to live a life of paradox and contradiction. It is to be overpowered by the immense bureaucratic organizations that have the power to control and often to destroy all communities, values, lives; and yet to be undeterred in our determination to face these forces, to fight to change their world and make it our own. It is to be both revolutionary and conservative: alive to new possibilities for experience and adventure, frightened by the nihilistic depths to which so many modern adventures lead, longing to create and to hold on to something real even as everything melts.” (13-14)

“I define modernism as any attempt by modern men and women to become subjects as well as objects of modernization, to get a grip on the modern world and make themselves at home in it.” (5-6)

Posted by lcn Posted in: modernism modernity No Comments » September 2008

Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life”

La modernité, c’est le fugitif, le transitoire, le contingent, la moitié de l’art, dont l’autre moitié est l’éternel et l’immuable.”

“Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is the one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immutable.”

Posted by lcn Posted in: modernism modernity No Comments » September 2008