New Word, Other Value

Recent studies on artistic modernism pay particular attention to the art histories of the non-West by doing less with Western theoretical conducts and how they define "modern art." The present book, in line with these studies, surveys artistic modernism while it recognizes "modernism" as a response to confluences of social, economic and political forces. The book thus skips frameworks of a comparative study for the strategies that mainly aim to unveil similarities or dissimilarities between what is modern and what is not. It instead returns to and captures the ways artists conceived their works as modern art; moreover, it collects documents which better display the relation between these works and their contextual causes: What is needed more now is an understanding of the necessities which encouraged artists into creating new forms as absolute responses.