āyā mudirnīsm shikast khawrdah ast?: Persian 1400

Modernism, the term used to describe the art and culture of the last hundred years, seems to be coming to an end. As we go through the troubling moral and intellectual consequences of what the American critic Irving Howe called "the decline of the new," it becomes increasingly difficult to believe in the possibility of another stylistic leap, another rise to the realm of radical form. In this complex transition from modernism to postmodernism, a new realm of consciousness is being conquered—one in which the boundaries of art seem to have become accessible, and the shedding of conventions has become the norm. As long as we want to consider everything as art, innovation will no longer be possible, or even desirable. At this point of rupture in the culture of modernism, the best thing to do is, in parallel, to distance ourselves from it, to see what exactly we have gained now that the avant-garde has finished its work; And likewise, what might we lose in its disappearance from the scene? It is not easy to imagine a whole made up of so many changes and irreconcilable contradictions. Are we living through an era of booming success and creativity or one marked by dullness and decay? Has modernism won or failed?