Militant Modernism by Owen Hatherley 📚

This is like the mirror of William Gibson’s quote, “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.”

We have been cheated out of the future, yet the future’s ruins lie about us, hidden or ostentatiously rotting.

This feels like commentary on the current era of social media.

Postmodernism’s stylistic eclecticism and tendency towards the replica and simulacra complicates memory

Be weird!

But from the earliest manifestations of pop culture in the late 40s onwards, working class culture’s avant-garde has always been totally, gleefully unafraid of looking like a wally. Ridicule is nothing to be scared of, as Adam Ant so wisely pointed out.

What is a castle but an unornamented, semi-military, functionalist fortress designed to protect its inhabitants?

the art instinct is permanently primitive…the artist of the modern movement is a savage