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Chapter Thirteen: Internationalizing the Aesthetic.
Stephen Spender, The Modern as a Vision of the Whole.
Spender explains that the movements of modern art and literature express the past-future confrontational view and analyzes six of them.
The first is realization through new art of the modern experience. Spender states that art is the only thing that remains archaic because artists have learned to connect past and modern changes in speech, vision and hearing and to mould them together. The great characteristic of realization, then, is the way artists pay attention to this break down in their work. .
The second is a pattern of hope created through art which results in influencing society. According to Spender, the basic reason for hope is that art may enable the artist to have a connection with the external world by affecting the lives of other people who share the artist's modern creative visions. Modern art is also revolutionary because the artist creates for the poor and oppressed rather than the rich. The hope in this is that art be the vehicle of inspiration for a new society.
The third is of shared life which is the use of art to interpret external materialism into the language of the inner life, often through the use of symbols. .
The fourth is the Alternate Life of Art which explores violence, sexual relations, madness, and drugs by creating art that gives the viewer or reader a feeling of them. This is also known as surrealism. .
The fifth, distortion, is usually shown in visual art rather than literature, although there are many instances of it there as well. Spender states that modern distortion is the last phased in interpreting, selecting and changing the image at the end of the line of tradition. One example is artistic portraits. When an artist creates a portrait it a self-portrait as well because they are creating it from their own eyes and are therefore seeing themselves, thereby creating a distortion of the other person.
