> Third, modernism was built on the principle that formal experimentation is the only thing that matters.

This is the most appealing thing about modernism to me — instead of continuing an exploitation of techniques that had been perfected, modernism was an exploration of what was possible — an attempted unbundling of the things that strike us about art like color, shape, texture, forms, frames, etc. The fatalism is a necessary consequence of this idea of taking some simple axioms and carrying them to their extremes.