The Cultural Background to the Machine Age
Christopher Crouch · 1999
In order to understand the issues of art and design practice in the twentieth century, we need to understand the many sources from which its different threads emerged. There is a need to understand where ideas about progress came from — why should progress be valued by Modernists rather than tradition ? We need to understand why there was an ambivalent attitude towards technology — why some artists and designers saw it as a threat, others as a blessing. And we need also to understand the cultural roots that provided one set of practitioners with an intimate, private and individual view of art and design, whilst others wanted a practice that embraced ideas of the collective. We can trace the origin of the ideas of the Modern Movement back as far as the Renaissance. But largely they stem from that period we call the Enlightenment, when scientific discoveries liberated the intellectual classes from a view that the past held a repository of knowledge that needed to be uncovered and restored, and allowed the intelligentsia to see the future as a place of potential growth and development. Access to these ideas was to be gained through experimentation and investigation of the unknown, rather than the careful sifting and codification of what might already exist.