Nowadays, for anyone who takes a keen interest in the arts and has acquired the habit of making them an object of critical thought, there is one issue—or perhaps I should say, one debate—which is more and more found to overshadow all others, and that is the debate over the nature and destiny of modernism. This debate takes many forms and addresses itself to a great many aspects of cultural life, from the most purely aesthetic to the most explicitly political. More over, the participants in this debate are extremely diverse. They include not only the expected artists and critics and patrons of the arts, and the administrators and publicists who preside over our arts institutions, but also specialists in the social sciences, political activists and theorists, journalists and editorial writers, and philosophers, intellectuals, and academics of all kinds—all of whom have lately discovered in the problem of modernism a subject they deem to be central to the cultural and political life of our time. All tend to enter into this debate with strong feelings, and indeed pronounced passions, which are not always based on a mastery of the materials under discussion but which nonetheless derive from a sense that something important has changed in the relation of culture to society in our world, the world of the bourgeois democracies, and that the key to this change is to be found in that complicated conjunction of historical developments which generally goes under the name of modernism.

A debate