High Modernism - in The Arts

In The Arts

Cultural critic Bram Dijkstra criticizes "high modernism" as an austere, abstract, and anti-humanist vision of modernism:

Much of the post-WWII high modernism in America and the rest of the western world is antihumanist, hostile to notions of community, of any form of humanism. It becomes about the lack of meaning, the need to create our own significance out of nothing. The highest level of significance, that of the elite, becomes abstraction. So the concept of the evolutionary elite arises again, deliberately excluding those who 'haven't evolved.'

High modernism is exemplified in the writings of Clement Greenberg, who described an opposition between "avant-garde" art and "kitsch" in his essay Avant-Garde and Kitsch. In music, the twelve-tone compositions of the Second Viennese School and especially their post-World War II followers such as Milton Babbitt expressed the astringent qualities associated with high modernism. Babbitt's well-known essay "Who Cares if You Listen" describes "efficiency", an increase in "the number of functions associated with each component", "a high degree of contextuality and autonomy", and an "extension of the methods of other musics" as among of the traits possessed by contemporary serious music.

In architecture, the International Style of uniformly rectangular, unornamented chrome, concrete, and glass buildings, as pioneered by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius and the Bauhaus, and Le Corbusier, are thought to be an expression of the austerity associated with high modernism.

"High modernism" is often used pejoratively by those who find these works of art distasteful (just as "conceptual art" is used pejoratively by its detractors, etc.).