Modernist artists engaged mass culture and revolutionary politics

Evidence

Even the forbiddingly mandarin Eliot loved the London music hall and sought to integrate its rhythms into some of his poetry, especially Sweeney Agonistes, Stravinsky wrote not only Le Sacre du printemps but also L’Histoire du soldat, which draws heavily on ragtime. If directed at the great Modernists’ Aestheticism, their tendency to view art as refuge from ‘the immense panorama of futility and anarchy that is contemporary history’, the accusation of elitism does strike home, but even here those committed to the idea of a radically novel Postmodern art must confront the development of avant-garde movements such as Dadaism, Construc­ tivism and Surrealism which deployed Modernist techniques to overcome the separation between art and life as part of a broader struggle to revolutionize society itself. — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 90

Categorization

• XREF: The specific examples (Eliot’s music hall, Stravinsky’s ragtime, Surrealist politics) give the reader concrete ammunition for the counter-thesis.