New Zealand Association for Research in Education Conference ( Hyatt Regency Hotel )

This paper maps definitions of modernism extracting some of the features of aesthetic modernism as it discusses Descartes, the Enlightenment, Cartesian rationalism and the notion of ‘aesthetics’. Within modernism, I consider its major assumptions, values, (or its aesthetic), the theoretical sources of formalism and the ideas and outstanding figures associated with modernism, such as Immanuel Kant whose work established the notion of the aesthetic as an end in itself. While recognising that the origins of art as a discourse were in the Renaissance and the Enlightenment project with its eighteenth century faith in reason, progress, and individual autonomy, the paper focuses upon aesthetic modernism as a twentieth century phenomenon.