The five paradoxes of modernity

Early in the nineteenth century Hegel pronounced that the greatness of art was past and that art was at an end. Is it this end, Antoine Compagnon asks, that we are now witnessing, almost two centuries later? Or is the present postmodern moment a result of the failure of doctrines to "explain" art, that is, to give it an "end" and to construe its history as "progress"? Is the postmodern the cutting edge of the modern or a breaking away from it? In this elegant, highly readable book, Compagnon confronts the postmodern's co-optation of the modern by tracing paradoxical elements in the aesthetic of the new - particularly the aesthetic and moral contradictions built into the enthusiasm for the new - in the "five paradoxes of modernity": the superstition of the new, the religion of the future, the mania for theory, the appeal to mass culture, and the passion for repudiation. Beginning with the writings of Nietzsche and Baudelaire, Compagnon considers Manet's Dejeuner sur l'herbe and Olympia, Apollinaire's calligrams, Duchamp's readymades, Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, and Warhol's silkscreens, in addition to the writings of Kandinsky, Mondrian, Venturi, and Calinescu, The analysis