josé ortega y gasset the dehumanization of art

This strategy blurred important distinctions between this century and the last.

He was forced to label even Analytic Cubism a “counter-revolution” against modernism and to push back the beginning of the modernist era to the middle of the nineteenth century to include the Impressionists (especially Monet), who were paradigmatic to his theory. Dada, Surrealism, Duchamp had no place in his system. In order to form such a theory, Greenberg was forced to ignore a great deal of twentieth-century European art. Greenberg’s modernism provided a positivist, determinist theory to support American art that was tied, ironically, to the values of both nineteenth-century capitalism with its emphasis on “taste” and “quality”) and nineteenth-century Marxism. The art of post-war America, Abstract Expressionism, was transcendentalist, expressionistic, and confident, like European art of the nineteenth century, where Europe was still an industrializing culture. Greenberg also sought to provide a theory of modernism for a country that, unlike its European counterparts, was not yet post-industrial, but still completing its initial state of industrial growth. Today, with those aspirations in shambles, it is not surprising that the ideas behind the equivalent aesthetic movement seem irrelevant and distant. Greenberg’s modernism sought to provide an artistic equivalent for America’s post-war aspirations to leadership of the western and developing nations. Another definition of modernism, outlined by the Spanish writer Jose Ortega y Gasset in his 1925 essay, “The Dehumanization of Art,” is both possible and more useful.Īny attempt to define the extent and character of modernist art is both a descriptive and a prescriptive exercise, since no definition of the characteristics of a society’s artistic production can be free of the author’s aspirations for that society. This formalist modernism was no better suited to define the past than it is the present. But Greenberg’s definition of modernism has never been adequate to define the full range of twentieth-century modernist art. Critics today seem to universally equate modernism with the formalist ideas developed by Clement Greenberg in the 1950’s. No writer, however, seems to have entertained the possibility that what is today though of as modernism is not really outdated, but merely badly formulated in the first place. These writers define post-modernism in various ways, but they share in common the belief that the age of modernist art is over and that anew set of theories is needed to describe art today. In the last few years, there has been a growing interest on the part of many critics in the idea of post-modernism.

Published in Arts Magazine, New York, Vol. Against Post-Modernism: Reconsidering Ortega

José ortega y gasset the dehumanization of art