54 (Harvey 1989, 18-19)

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(Harvey 1989, 18-19)

By the beginning of the twentieth century, and particularly after Nietzsche’s intervention, it was no longer possible to accord Enlightenment reason a privileged status in the definition of the eternal and immutable essence of human nature. To the degree that Nietzsche had led the way in placing aesthetics above science, rationality, and politics, so the exploration of aesthetic experience—’beyond good and evil’—became a powerful means to establish a new mythology as to what the eternal and the immutable might be about in the midst of all the ephemerality, fragmentation, and patent chaos of modern life. This gave a new role, and a new impetus, to cultural modernism. Artists, writers, architects, composers, poets, thinkers, and philosophers had a very special position within this new conception of the modernist project. If the ’eternal and immutable’ could no longer be automatically presupposed, then the modern artist had a creative role to play in defining the essence of humanity. If ’creative destruction’ was an essential condition of modernity, then perhaps the artist as individual had a heroic role to play (even if the consequences might be tragic). The artist, argued Frank Lloyd Wright—one of the greatest of all modernist architects—must not only comprehend the spirit of his age but also initiate the process of changing it.