After the Great Divide. Modernism, Mass Culture, Post Modernism Analysis

In his essay After the Great Divide. Modernism, Mass Culture, Post Modernism, Andreas Huyssen argues that “since the mid 19th century, the culture of modernity has been characterised by a volatile relationship between high art and mass culture.” The writer states that Modernist artists strove to distance themselves from the “l’art pour l’art” movements of the turn of the century like Art Nouveau, Symbolism and Æstheticism. This type of art pandered to the tastes of the middle classes striving to live “the good life” which evolved into a culture of decadence and indulgence. The Modernists also distanced themselves from Abstract Expressionism during the Post World War II years, favouring autonomy, a hostility to mass culture and a “radical separation from the culture of everyday life” rather than a desire to “find a content rich with meaning and redolent of social responsibility.”
Huyssen highlights that the most significant Modernist “attack” on the æsthetic ideas of the self-sufficiency of high culture in the 19th century resulted from a discord of the independent modernist æsthetic within the post World War I revolutionary politics in Russia and Germany, and the increasingly rapid evolution of city life during the early 20th century. Huyssen asserts that the attack was known as the historical avant garde symbolising a new æsthetical approach, manifested in movements like expressionism, Berlin Dada, Russian constructivism, the post Russian Revolution proletkult and French Surrealism. The author ascribes this presence to a so-called “Great Divide” separating high art from mass culture, which he insists is imperative to the theoretical and historical understanding of modernism. The book Fin de Siécle and Its Legacy states that Huyssen’s thesis about postmodernity is highly debateable, and that artistic modernism can only be understood in relation to the developments that came after the emergence of new mass communications technologies from the time of

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