what is modernism?

Answer 1

Picasso in painting. Stravinsky in music. T.S. Eliot in poetry and James Joyce in fiction. Abstraction or non-representational art. Cubism in painting. Seemingly non-linear or plotless fiction. Free verse without rhyme. Frank Lloyd Wright in architecture. Some people detest modernism and deny it the status of art: they consider it subjective meaningless gibberish but the 20th century would be hard to imagine without modernism. It delves into extraordinary or hallucinated mental states, partly under the influence of Freud. Eliot and Joyce draw on the entire Western literary tradition going back to Homer, a way of making the old new. Jazz too became modernist under the influence of Charlie Parker (the Bird) and John Coltrane.

Answer 2

Modernism is a trend of thought which affirms the power of human beings to make, improve and reshape their built and designed environment, with the aid of scientific knowledge, technology and practical experimentation, thus in its essence both progressive and optimistic. The term covers many political, cultural and artistic movements rooted in the changes in Western society at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. Broadly, modernism describes a series of reforming cultural movements in art and architecture, music, literature and the applied arts which emerged in the decades before 1914. Embracing change and the present, modernism encompasses the works of artists, thinkers, writers and designers who rebelled against nineteenth century academic and historicist traditions, and confronted the new economic, social and political aspects of an emerging fully industrialized world.
In the search for continual improvement that characterizes modernism, individual modern movements often disclaim the authenticity of other modern movements in handling issues such as the relative importance of objectivity and subjectivity, simplicity versus complexity, high versus low and other perceived dichotomies. The reconciliation of apparent opposites has then given rise to additional modernist forms.
Some divide the 20th century into movements designated Modernism and Postmodernism, whereas others see them as two aspects of the same movement.

Answer 3

Being modern.