Modernist Fraud: Hoax, Parody, Deception by Leonard Diepeveen (review)

Narratives of modernism sometimes briefly acknowledge its dismissive reception—an explosion in a shingle factory, playing tennis with the net down—before moving on to recount the eventual triumphs of the art we consider to be on the right side of history. In Modernist Fraud, Diepeveen sits with the skeptics, considering the basis for their suspicion and the work their critique was meant to do in the world.

The early chapters of Modernist Fraud excavate the normative assumptions of the period, which Diepeveen dubs the "default aesthetic" (43). Whether looking at a painting or reading a poem, critics and viewers imagined art to be universal, its purposes clear and aligned with tradition. Romantic sincerity and mimetic representational practices were yoked together with a kind of general gloss of prettiness applied overall. Chapter two, "Default Settings," grapples with the critical writing that champions this aesthetic, finding that it operates in different registers than present-day readers might expect. It is "relentlessly general," marshaling authority not through the reading of evidence but through the accumulation of sentiment (45). The new art, exemplified by Tender Buttons (1914) and The Waste Land (1922) in writing and Nude Descending a Staircase (1912) in painting, is neither sincere nor representational, and cannot be understood using the principles of the default aesthetic.

Mainstream responses to these modern experiments used a common language, Diepeveen says: "the shorthand language of fraud" (9). Modern art had to be a joke or hoax, conventional critics implied, because it strayed so far afield from dominant ideas about how art was supposed to work. Those aesthetic norms were so widely held, so obvious, that they could be called upon without being explicitly described. Any art that failed to play by those rules was fundamentally fraudulent. It could be, and even should be, dismissed out of hand.

Critics who worked within the default aesthetic did not continue to write in the same way about new modes of artmaking. They turned to parody instead, writing tossed off imitations that heightened experimentalism to absurdity in order to highlight the originals' lack of craft and designate them as unworthy of serious consideration. Many such texts are collected in Mock Modernism: An Anthology of Parodies, Travesties, Frauds, 1910–1935 (2013), which Diepeveen edited. Chapter three, "Modern Parody," addresses the rhetorical situation in which these critical parodies operate. These parodies had to identify and imitate salient features of the original text while still signaling their commitment to alternate aesthetic values. The reader of the parody has to recognize the original work being cited and its failure to meet the expectations of the default aesthetic. These conditions are tough to achieve, and the parodies often failed. The Spectra school of poetry, for one, was conceived as a hoax but interpreted by Ezra Pound as merely a less successful version of imagism. Spectra was even burlesqued itself, with the Wisconsin Literary Magazine imagining a parodic movement called "Ultra–Violet school" of poetry (63). Here we can see the slipperiness of the hoax as a strategy and the high risk that it might miss its mark.

Chapter four, "Sincerity's Champions," goes into further detail in its consideration of why the critics found these new works of art to be so troubling. The critical response was not merely a matter of taste; the paintings and poems of early modernism eschewed some of the bedrock features that made a piece of art categorically legible as art. Even champions of modernism such as Harriet Monroe assumed that works of art needed to demonstrate intention, sincerity, and skill. When the work seems inscrutable, ironic, or artless, then critics found it hard to judge. The shifting aesthetic valuations were so contentious that they had to be argued in the courts: a 1927 New York trial regarding the cost of importing the Constantin Brâncuşi sculpture Bird in Space shows the arguments against calling it art (lack of mimetic fidelity) and those in favor (beauty, symmetry, lack of utility). The value of art...