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As a culmination of my points on modern artists and the transcendent (for now, since this is an ongoing investigation), here is a quote which I had previously posted, from Bruce Elder's new book Harmony and Dissent: Film and Avant-garde Art Movements in the Early Twentieth Century on avant-garde artists and their their manufactured transcendence. Elder states clearly that artists knew what they were doing and pursuing. The search for transcendence was, and still is, a major component of their art.
Vanguard artists proposed that a universal transcendent art might come forth, might yet unite the arts, might yet re-enchant the world of nature and even of ordinary objects by treating them as hieroglyphs of an invisible reality, and so sway the mind toward a creator-unity immanent in nature. That new art might yet come forth that could fully express the artist's mind. At the beginning of the twentieth century, cinema seemed to many that most closely approximated this ideal. Furthermore... they believed that since it was a synthetic art that exemplified the best attributes of each of the other arts, it was the Ottima Arte.
