"The huge problem in our society is the enormous ignorance of the ideas that underlie modern art"
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Mayne’s jab isn’t really aimed at the public’s taste; it’s aimed at the public’s confidence in dismissing modernism without learning its grammar. Calling it a “huge problem” frames ignorance as civic infrastructure: not a personal failing, but a systemic condition that shapes what gets built, funded, preserved, or torn down. The line carries an architect’s pragmatism. If a city can’t read the ideas behind modern art - abstraction, rupture, systems thinking, critique of ornament, new relationships between material and meaning - it can’t evaluate contemporary architecture on anything but vibes: “cold,” “ugly,” “doesn’t fit.”
The subtext is defensive, but not merely elitist. Mayne has spent a career watching design competitions and public hearings turn into referendums on nostalgia. “Ideas that underlie” signals that modern art is not a style so much as an argument about modern life: speed, mass production, fractured attention, plural identities, the alienation and freedoms of the 20th century. If you don’t grasp that argument, you’re left judging the results as if they were supposed to behave like a Renaissance painting or a Victorian facade.
Context matters: Mayne comes out of the Southern California avant-garde and the institutional battles of late-20th-century architecture, where “modern” became a punching bag for everything from bureaucratic urban renewal to aesthetic snobbery. His complaint doubles as a political warning. Ignorance doesn’t stay in museums; it becomes policy. When the public can’t decode the intent, bold work gets punished, safe pastiche gets rewarded, and the built world starts lying about the time it was made in.
The subtext is defensive, but not merely elitist. Mayne has spent a career watching design competitions and public hearings turn into referendums on nostalgia. “Ideas that underlie” signals that modern art is not a style so much as an argument about modern life: speed, mass production, fractured attention, plural identities, the alienation and freedoms of the 20th century. If you don’t grasp that argument, you’re left judging the results as if they were supposed to behave like a Renaissance painting or a Victorian facade.
Context matters: Mayne comes out of the Southern California avant-garde and the institutional battles of late-20th-century architecture, where “modern” became a punching bag for everything from bureaucratic urban renewal to aesthetic snobbery. His complaint doubles as a political warning. Ignorance doesn’t stay in museums; it becomes policy. When the public can’t decode the intent, bold work gets punished, safe pastiche gets rewarded, and the built world starts lying about the time it was made in.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
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