Modernism

Modernism excuses many things, many terrible things, and even engenders them. In our own times I'm impressed if a student can understand their shopping trip to Westfield. My perspective is, if they are not busy changing the world, it's at least best that they attempt to understand it, and if they can't do that, then they're lost.
It is clear that the generation born of the nineties faces almost insurmountable problems in their encounters with modernism. Le Corbusier's Unite d'Habitation indeed 'looks just like a council block', Mies' IIT 'looks awful', his Berlin New National Gallery 'may as well be an Audi showroom' and so on. I heard Zizek say on YouTube that when it came to music, he was a profound conservative, and for him, all popular music of value existed only between the years 1965-75. I smiled with him, since as I struggled to watch Kasabian I realised I was watching the appropriation of effects, rather like using a Mies day-bed in a porn movie.
Before terms starts Julie is taking me back to La Tourette. Three night's should be enough to remind you of the power to change the world rather than consume it, as long as it's preceded by two in the Quality Inn in metropolitan Lyon.
Photo by me.