Modern Art Old Wine in Term Paper

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Rather than seeking to emulate an ideal, they sought instead to cobble together influences, styles, and techniques from a range of different traditions. Relying on what others have created without actually valuing those creations on their own merits is not respectful of either tradition or innovation.

The result was a hodge-podge of aesthetics that is not without merit, but that is criticized now (and for quite a time) for not having a clear focus. Mannerist artists neither venerated the past nor sought to create an entirely new way of seeing. They often did incorporate fantastical subjects and twisted the forms of both of these creatures and of human subjects into sinewy shapes. The effect was not so much dreamlike (or even nightmarish) but distorted.

Even as Mannerist artists borrowed freely from other traditions and so seemed to devalue the worth of innovation and the allure of the new, they did so in a way that might be considered essentially disrespectful. The overall result -- as in Hendrik Goltzius's 1588 The Dragon Devouring the Companions of Cadmus and Bronzino's Exposure of Luxury (1546) -- is an unsettling mixture of an artistic era that could not decide whether to move forward or be pulled back into the past.

Modern art in general has had a much more positive regard for the innovative and new. The reasons for this are complicated but may reflect consequences that have arose since the Industrial Revolution. Industrialization brought about two important trends that affected the ways in which artists interact with and feel about the new. Industrialization made constant innovation a social good in a way that had never been true before.

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The fact that new technologies made it easier and easier to create novel objects in the commercial world bled over to a push toward the innovative in art.

The early phases of Modernist art played directly with the ideas of how technology and art intersected with each other and how the new era of the machine made it more difficult to create work that was based on the past. The machine changed everything and made it imperative for artists to re-evaluate what it meant to be an artist at all. Daumier's 1862 Nadar Elevating Photography to the Height of Art is an ironic visual exploration of the ways in which having artistic tools such as the camera made it impossible to make art as it once was. Timothy O' Sullivan's A Harvest of Death (1863) proved incontrovertibly that new technologies changed the way in which everyone (not just artists) would view the world.

The next phase of Modernist art continued the valorization of the new, although in far more ironic ways. Indeed, irony itself in many ways can be seen to be the way in which many artists chose to confront the emphasis on the new. Beginning with the (then) new century, artists tried to combine new technologies and new social mores to ensure their audiences that they were the newest and therefore the best thing. Giacomo Balla's Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash (1912) focused on the ways in which technology affects the literal ways in which people view the world while a work like Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 (1912) incorporating much more traditional artistic techniques with.....

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