On May 10, 2012, at 9:16 AM, William Conger wrote: > Modernism > can't be traced back to a single year, artist, or subject but is found emerging > from many sources and trends as early as the 1750s or, if one chooses, 1650, 0r > even 1550, etc. There is, actually, no single beginning of anything cultural > just as there is no ending. There are only different perspectives and choices > for telling the stories about the past.
William's insight here is true. Expressed in terms of philosophy of language, mind, and ontology: there is no ontic entity that is a "movement". For example, "Modernism" is solely a notional entity, that varies from mind to mind. There is no Platonic fact-of-the-matter that is "Modernism". Even "Pre-Raphealite" style is not historically discrete. A non-scholar layman like me can claim to recognize that style long before Burne-Jones, Morris, Rossetti et al in, say, the work of Blake, Fuseli, and others. And when Blake talks of Raphael and Michelangelo, I can detect what I see as the early generations of P-R style. Even the notion of "resemblance" is solely notional. "Resemblance" of one style to another, one painter to another, is solely the product of minds. "Resemblance" is not an ontic fact. We can point at isolated elements of a "style" and say that's why claim it is "in the style of", but that's merely a description of why we stipulate, but stipulation is not creation.
