When the Machine Age gears up to destroy a whole generation of men tethered to machines and poverty in Europe, it gets Dada, Max Ernst and Otto Dix, and Pierrot Lunaire.
Perspectives change; they become radicalised. So where Goya depicted even something evil - a witches' sabbath, with Satan to boot - using a colour scheme which now would trick us into believing that beauty = sympathy, the Generation of 1918 reduced the splendour of a landscape or the heroism of war into something suspicious and sinister:
The glories of Classicism from the early Industrial Revolution become nothing more than the glories of the class whose lust for honour and glory and wealth took the peasant and incarcerated him in the factory, and then sent him off to fight a war from which few of his number returned. Beauty becomes suspicion; form becomes function.
The ideals of the age are stripped away and the bare reality is exaggerated. Schinkel's classicism gives way to the astringent Bauhaus.
It took over one hundred years of middle-class liberalism (1789-1918) to make the transition from Romanticism to 'pure' Modernism; from the early revolutionary promise of the French Revolution, which provided so much hope to Wordsworth and Coleridge in England, and Hegel and Hoelderlin in Germany, to the disillusionment of the first of the Western 'Peloponnesian' Wars 1914-1918. Gyorgy Lukacs referred to this as the transtion of the bourgeois from its heroic period to its unheroic period in his 1934 essay on Hoelderlin - from the Bastille to Bernard Baruch, in our view.
How does one then characterise the post-Cold War age? Cursorily, it feels like a later development of seeds already sown in earlier ages. All political life is subordinated to the management of the economy (cf. global sovereign debt crisis and austerity) - as in the Weimar Republic; high finance is ubiquitous and troublesome, as in President Jackson's age; globalisation proceeds apace (forseen by Marx in part one of his German Ideology); cultural cynicism is as strong as after the Great War; democracy and the problem of the citizen unleashed by Bastille is more widely spread; technology is as unavoidable as when the Luddites smashed their first machines in England.
Intensification and exhaustion perhaps characterise our age.
Burning Pyre's next post will test the proposition that 'every age gets the art it deserves' and attempt to falsify its conviction that our age - call it what you will - is an intensification of long-lived trends and is as a result exhausted.
