TJ Clark on holding modernity in contempt
We’re not dealing, needless to say, with a recipe or prescription. (“Painter, be as narrow-minded as Matisse …”) We’re confronting one of the paradoxes of modernity: that those who are surest they can speak to modern life almost invariably reproduce nothing but clichés about it; and that a few—a very few—of those holding modernity (rightfully) in contempt, but (wrongfully) thinking art might offer a way out of it, end up, poor devils, with the feel of the modern issuing from their brush.