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Notes -
Although I think this is somewhat of an oversimplification - people have been making weird shit for a long time, and I doubt that an author like say, John Donne, would have conceived of his project as "communicating complex ideas to as wide an audience as possible" - I do agree that the self-conscious elitism of early 20th century modernism, and the degree to which it stressed art's own self-consciousness, were genuinely historically novel. In spite of modernism's alleged "overcoming" by "postmodernism" (more and more people are beginning to question if the two are really distinct at all), these tenets have permeated culture and continue to influence art today.
I would never admit this on any left-wing site, but of the two great art exhibitions of 1937, I aesthetically prefer the "German art" to the "degenerate art". And I don't think that ipso facto makes me a fascist.
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