Excerpt from David Hopkins's "After Modern Art 1945 - 2000" on definitions of Modernism
"In terms of its historical/critical usage, 'modernism' normally covers two impulses. The first of these involves the demand (first voiced self-consciously in the nineteenth-century French poet Baudelaire's critical writings) that the visual arts should reflect of exemplify broad processes of modernization and their societal effects. The second is bound up with the evaluation of the quality of works of art. Here works of art have to measure up to criteria of aesthetic innovation while being distinguishable from a set of indicators of 'non-art' status (the terms 'academic' or 'kitsch' being two such pejorative terms).
Greenberg's capitalization of the word 'Modernism' implies a formalization of the second of these definitions, whilst its subsequent elaboration as a theory implicitly downplays the consequences of the first definition, with which the notion of a socially disaffirmative 'avant-garde' is bound up. As explained by Greenberg in his key 'Modernist Painting' essay of 1961: 'The essence of Modernism lies . . . in the use of the characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it but to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence'. The warning against the 'subversion' of the discipline is included to rule out socially generated anti-art impulses, such as Dada and much of Surrealism, from the Modernist master-plan; Greenberg was notoriously opposed to the French proto-Dadaist, Marcel Duchamp."
Excerpt from David Hopkins's "After Modern Art 1945 - 2000" on definitions of Modernism
