The Decline of the Modern Age
In: Telos, Heft 62, S. 117-130
ISSN: 0040-2842, 0090-6514
In the early 1920s, a type of postmodernism can be found in Pablo Picasso's & Arnold Schonberg's neoclassical works. Theodor W. Adorno's various attempts to cope with this phenomenon are discussed (eg, Aesthetic Theory, London, 1984). Although some elements of a postmodernist critique of modernism can be found in Adorno, he does not draw conclusions from his critique of modern composers for their infatuation with the material & lack of expression. Three different interpretations of the concept of postmodernism are proposed: (1) the antimodern interpretation that turns the waning of modernism into a pledge for a neoconservative academism; (2) the pluralistic interpretation that sees insight into the availability of different stocks of material as an indifferent eclecticism; & (3) a dialectical continuation of modernism, heir of aestheticist formalism & of the avant-garde protest against it, that pledges a resemanticization of art. Modified AA