Full Description
What made art modern? What is modern art? The Legends of the Modern demystifies the ideas and "legends" that have shaped our appreciation of modern art and literature.
Beginning with an examination of the early modern artists Shakespeare, Michelangelo, and Cervantes, Didier Maleuvre demonstrates how many of the foundational works of modern culture were born not from the legendry of expressive freedom, originality, creativity, subversion, or spiritual profundity but out of unease with these ideas. This ambivalence toward the modern has lain at the heart of artistic modernity from the late Renaissance onward, and the arts have since then shown both exhilaration and disappointment with their own creative power. The Legends of the Modern lays bare the many contradictions that pull at the fabric of modernity and demonstrates that modern art's dissatisfaction with modernity is in fact a vital facet of this cultural period.
Contents
Introduction
Part I: What Made Art Modern
1. Hamlet, or Art against Itself
2. Michelangelo, or the Labors of Freedom
3. Don Quixote, or the Weakness of Fiction
Part II: What Makes Modern Art
4. The Inward Turn
5. The Legend of Freedom
6. The Legend of the Artist
7. The Legend of the New
8. The Legend of Creativity
9. The Legend of Artistic Block
10. The Legend of Transcendence
11. The Legend of Subversion
12. The Legend of the End of Art
Coda
Notes
Bibliography
Index
