A Technological Revolution

29 August 2018

The artifacts of modernity—typewriters, automobiles, cameras, airplanes, radios—sparked the imagination of a new generation of writers and artists.

1920s government: Industrial development as priority. Modernist artists were at the same time drawn to industry (Rivera’s murals of Detroit), machines (Tina Modotti’s telegraph wires), cities.

Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” was written around the same time.