For members of a traditional society where many traditions have been discredited, an interest in modernity can result in a restless sophistication. Mehmet Ertegun seems not to have been a restless man.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Today's man of the world proclaims that sin, and his enterprising in sin, are a part of modern living, but it is not modern. It goes back to Adam and Eve - to desire and the temptation to know - to experience evil.
Tradition is the illusion of permanance.
Traditionalists are pessimists about the future and optimists about the past.
Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.
The idea of modernity is beginning to lose its vitality. It is losing it because modernity is no longer a critical attitude but an accepted, codified convention.
A society that does not correctly interpret and appreciate its past cannot understand its present fortunes and adversities and can be caught unawares in a fast changing world.
You have to modernise; you have to change - you can't just be traditional for the fun of being traditional.
Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.
I am truly horrified by modern man. Such absence of feeling, such narrowness of outlook, such lack of passion and information, such feebleness of thought.
Restlessness is discontent and discontent is the first necessity of progress. Show me a thoroughly satisfied man and I will show you a failure.