Shklovsky and Modernism
Art and literature are difficult to interpret,therefore students need to look towards the experts in order to understand art criticism. Men like Viktor Shklovskyexist in order to help students understand art as a technique and art theory.Shklovsky wrote on modernism and how art is perceived in the modern world today. In your research paper on Viktor Shklovsky, begin with one overreaching theory, such as his idea that the object in which art is depicting is not as important as the overall theme of the work of art. If you will "wow" your professor with this type of explication, you are sure to succeed in your art history course. If you have difficulty with understanding critics like Shklovskyand their work on modernism, get help from the professional art and literature writers at Paper Masters.
In your essay, point out that Shklovsky identifies the most powerful aspect of art to be the means by which the familiar is made unfamiliar. This forces a reappraisal of objects and events that have been deadened by one's routine exposure to them. Shklovsky then spends the majority of the essay delineating various methods and techniques by which artists can use "defamiliarization" to shock viewers/readers into a state of heightened perception and acute awareness. In this way, art can be used as a means of leading people to greater understanding and insight.
Shklovsky and Modernism
However, the eventuality that Shklovsky (writing in 1917) could not foresee was the gradual habitualization of defamiliarization, as it were. Today, the fragmented aesthetic that defines the postmodern sensibility has rendered the modern audience largely unsusceptible to the sort of jarring epiphany that Shklovsky idealizes in this essay. The many ensuing decades of sensationalistic, surrealistic modern and postmodern art, often typified by the defamiliarized, out-of-context image, have rendered contemporary audiences resistant to the transformative power that Shklovsky saw in the early works of modernism.