twentieth-century art

It has often been said that after 1900 formal modernism diminished the role of the mimetic (i.e., imitation or representation) in all arts. This article opposes such a general conclusion. Formal modernism in art did not represent any general relationship to the mimetic; rather, it questioned the traditional relationship to forms of representation within each particular art form. Although a traditional notion of mimesis indeed makes it possible to see a good deal of literature and the visual arts as less mimetic after 1900, twentieth-century music discovered unprecedented representational possibilities, which are illustrated with the case of musique concrète. In the last section, the article reflects on its thesis with a comparative perspective on the postmodernist turn in various arts.