A Straight T and Very Narrow Utopia ; an Exhibition at the VA Reveals That Modernism Whimsical, Shoddy, Charmless Was as Deficient in Practice as in Theory

Beginning of article

MODERNISM is a portmanteau term and, like the portmanteau of the baggage world, it expands to accommodate whatever is stuffed into it until - as now - it bulges so much that it splits its seams. No institution is better qualified to unpack it than the VA Museum, that stern guardian of the territory between art and craft, the beautifully useless and the functionally useful, to discard what is simply Thirties kitsch and tainted by Art Deco, and puritanically reassert that Modernism in its day occupied the moral high ground of design and art.

Modernism, so the rhetoric goes, was the visible expression of ideal societies that were to be compliant and obedient, …