The most evident social trend of the 20th century has been consolidation -- multinationalized businesses, globalized politics, homogenized cultures. Amid this bustling bigness and togetherness has been heard a persistent cry of smallness and aloneness, a sense that comforting certainties are being stripped away and each individual left isolated with nameless terrors, deterioration and death. Painters and composers, philosophers and poets have struggled to express this sensibility by reducing their art forms to the essential, scaling ambition down from the eternal to the minimal. Where once creators held that truth was beauty, in these despondent works truth is achingly ugly, beauty...
To continue reading:
or
Log-In
