For a real exhibition of modernism, skip the V&A and go to Manchester The human misery of crumbling estates is the malign legacy of these aesthetic authoritarians and their machine fetish
Simon Jenkins Friday April 7, 2006 The Guardian Go at once. Take a young person to see the Modernism show at the V&A and feel fear. It is the most terrifying exhibition I have seen, because it is politics disguised as art. It opens with a word that says it all - utopia - and ends with an unspoken lie, that this nihilist ideology became merely a style and is no longer a threat. If only. The modernists were the neocons of 20th-century art. They took a sound methodology - the questioning of conventional wisdom - and made it a dogma that brooked no opposition, even from reality. They turned a fad into a political programme, asserting "we" as sovereign over "them". Though Hitler closed the Bauhaus and Stalin loved Corinthian columns, the modernist utopia fuelled fascism and communism and bred a tradition of stylistic authority still alive today. cont'd.... http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1748821,00.html _______________________________________________ in-enaction mailing list http://mail.architexturez.net/mailman/listinfo/in-enaction + Architexturez collaborative at http://portal.architexturez.org/
