"Modernism seeks to disturb" and I'll add: it has scared children from classical music

[weary flake]

Some excerpts from an editorial in the American Record Guide,
issue Sep/Oct 2018:

Modernist art is willfully opaque, works with unfamiliar forms,
is self-consciously experimental, and seeks deliberately to
disturb the audience -- to shock it, shake it up, even to
transform it as in a religious conversion. Its very difficulty
is clearly one source of its appeal to initiates: esoteric
knowledge, like the special formula of the magi or the
hermeticism of ancient priests, gives one an enhanced sense of
power over the vulgar and the unenlightened.

Modernism created an adversary culture that has dominated the
arts ever since. The artists have been rebelling against
bourgeois values and products, including romanticism. Modernism
seeks to disturb. People who like it consider that part of its
appeal; the rest of us consider people who like it masochists.
Art is no longer contemplative (the contemplator in control) but
seeks to overwhelm.

[dk]

Post by weary flake
Some excerpts from an editorial in the American Record Guide,
Modernist art is willfully opaque, works with unfamiliar forms,
is self-consciously experimental, and seeks deliberately to
disturb the audience -- to shock it, shake it up, even to
transform it as in a religious conversion. Its very difficulty
is clearly one source of its appeal to initiates: esoteric
knowledge, like the special formula of the magi or the
hermeticism of ancient priests, gives one an enhanced
sense of power over the vulgar and the unenlightened.
Modernism created an adversary culture that has dominated
the arts ever since. The artists have been rebelling against
bourgeois values and products, including romanticism. Modernism
seeks to disturb. People who like it consider that part of its
appeal; the rest of us consider people who like it masochists.
Art is no longer contemplative (the contemplator in control) but
seeks to overwhelm.

Vote with your ears and with your wallets.

dk