Modern Sincerity, Individuals, and Groups

Modernist Studies Association Conference
Montreal, 2009

Modernism was the scene of new modes of establishing trust, modes that, at the same time, were perceived to threaten trust — the most notable instance being advertising. Within art, modernism also saw the same kinds of vacillations about trust, vacillations brought into play, as elsewhere, by two modes of trust in conflict, one new, one old. The new mode of trust was based on professionalism, a central modernist mechanism for creating trust both at a distance and in the face of a proliferation of aesthetic production. In particular, modernism saw the rise of two central devices of professionalism: manifesto writing and group associations. Both being about a clear articulations of boundaries and standards, they were designed to instill trust. Their success was mixed; the precise things that in a professionalist society should inspire trust — group associations and a clear articulation of standards — did not do so in many public reactions to modernist art.

Old mechanisms for establishing trust, which had been central to aesthetic experience, stood in the way. Trust in art had been premised on a definition of a sincerity whose enabling conditions were individual expression, and an ad hoc response to the local conditions before one. Modernism’s group associations and manifestoes — and the belief in theory which undergirded them — went against this.

A single opposition between two types of artists/critics oversimplifies things, however. The fault lines of this distrust were seen not just in reactions of critics and a public associated with the genteel or belles lettres traditions; they ran through the center of modernism. A modernist like Eliot was wary of group associations, and many poets were nervous about the proliferation of anthologies and the theories that gave them these anthologies their boundaries. This unresolved tension over two modes of sincerity had a long shelf life, continuing late into the twentieth century.