This book talks about 14 incidents, or moments, including Hercules’s torso in the writing of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, photos of Alabama sharecroppers taken by James Agee, Hegel’s visit to a museum, Emerson’s lecture in Boston, Mallarmé’s night in the Folies Bergère, an exhibition staged in Paris or New York, a film set in Moscow, factory based in Berlin, etc. Through these well-known or unknown scenes, we can inquire about what art is and what it brings. We can learn from the chapters a system of artistic interpretation that breaks down boundaries among different schools of arts, and between art and every-day experience — it is thereby self-established and transformed.
From the book, we can understand how a fragmented sculpture becomes a perfect artwork, how a portrait of poor kids embodies a dream, how a group of acrobats do somersaults in a poetic fashion, how a piece of furniture is honored as a palace hall, how a flight of stairs shape a character, how a patched jacket reflects distinguished traits of a person, how creases on the sail suggest the origin of universe, and how an accelerated montage video presents the emotional reality of communism: this is a history of modernity in art, which is definitely different from modernism in its orthodox sense.
