isms, in my opinion...

lileks slams the idiocy of modernism:

"(youth culture is) yammering infantile babblings that shoved all the marginalia into the center of our field of vision and demanded that we pretend it mattered just as much as the serious concerns of previous eras.

But modernism was youth culture. It had the same old predictable motivation: down with Daddy.

Every era rebels against the precepts of the previous iteration, but after the Romantics it was no longer a matter of stylistic variations. Heart over head. The inauthenticity of artifice, as if artifice isn’t an essential quality of creation. Movements like this begin well, handled by the capable hands of people who have skill and understand form, but the torch is always grabbed by those who are attracted to destruction more than creation. The French and Russian revolutions began with the convening of popular assemblies, but there are always those guys in the back, chewing their nails, one leg jackhammering up and down, waiting for the moment to use the tools of reason to level the old bad world and build utopia. They are consumed with the notion of sin, but it’s sundered from the old conceptions. No longer a matter of the individual and God. There is no true individual, only masses, There is no God; there is the state. The slate must be cleared. The fresh slates must be reserved for those who write what is helpful. The chalkmakers must be purged lest anyone outside the circle write something contrary.

The primary urge of the revolutionary and the modernist and the adolescent: impatience."

this one's a must-read-it-all piece.