Slop.

This documentary series by Marxist art theorist John Berger gives a great overview of modernism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXl4U1gFTto

This one, The Shock of the New by Robert Hughes, was my introduction to modernism and really hits at the broad themes of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3ne7Udaetg&list=PLFtSvldL7Mh4ismj4BgH33pBR9hbtBkxz

Modernism is the period between 1870-1970~ where art's value came from doing something genuinely new for a larger movement within it. That might be impressionists challenging the French system of art schools and galleries rewarding failsons, painting a common man's unique individual perspective of a common thing. That might be cubism where you're painting in the fourth dimension. The Soviet constructivists were reimagining what a society could look like through art, the futurists were exploring our transition to an industrial society and how that distorts our sense of space and time, the surrealists were incorporating psychology into art, and the dadaists were attacking everything in their society with proto-shitposting. The social realists were making public art with poverty as a theme and the socialist realists were making public art with the dignity of common work and achievements of workers as a theme. In all of these movements you were teaching your audience how to see something new as art which connects them to others.

Most of our great art theory comes from this period because it rewarded you for having a critical outsider perspective. We were learning how to throw out the old European structures that restrained creativity, how to grapple with art in the age of capitalism and industrial reproduction, and how to weaponise art.

Things started breaking down in the 1950s. The period that came next, between 1970-2000~, is postmodernism. If modernism says that value comes from a contribution to a larger project, postmodernism says that there is no larger project or objective truth to be learned and value comes from individual expression in the marketplace of ideas. The postmodern world is ideologically flattened, deconstructed, given a sense of moral relativism, and expressed ironically. Individuals don't work toward a larger truth but have their own little truth that's as valid as anyone else's.

Meta-modernism is what we are, the post-social media 2010-present period where we believe in something larger but use irony to express sincerity. All the products of postmodernism- Garfield, Thomas Kinkade, the New York Times op-ed writers, algorithmic spectacle and atomisation and hyperreality- are things which we attack in the same way the dadaists did with 1910s-20s Germany. The difference between us and the dadaists is that we've learned how the old order responds to meaningful new art and we build structures to reinforce the legitimacy of it using their language. That might a website like Hexbear where you have to parse multiple layers of meme culture, ironic doomerism, Maoist Standard English, and historical examples to be able to tell whether a post is sincere or not. It could be a movement like Goblincore where you're rejecting consumerism and gender conventions to embrace culturally ugly things as organically beautiful in a new biocentric environmentalist framework. It could be Slammer making an entire memetic language out of crude photoshops, each of them being completely true while they're incomprehensible and shocking to people who don't know what he's making. With all of these we're definitively saying that there is something larger that we can work toward, but that we live in an absurd society requiring an absurdist response tailored to people who've grown up in such a fast and profane place.