Conrad's analysis of art becomes art in its own right, as intrepidly impermanent as the implication of any abstract painting. Here is a volume of reflections that slip and slide, that cohere more through their impressionistic energy than any organizing schema, that flit about like brazenly rebellious subatomic particles. Modernity, says Conrad, has been about acceleration and dispersal, and yet, at a certain point in the modern experience, time and place seemed no longer to matter. Like its subject, twentieth-century culture, the book leads nowhere, yet everywhere. The modern world has, in centrifugal fury, spun itself to pieces.
Nullity is, in Conrad's view, the great modern terminus.
He pursues these themes of decentering and destabilization through many realms of expression, music, film, literature, and design, showing how our journey to the edge has been motivated as much by a desire to escape authority as by the thrill of renewal. In the process, of course, the frontier has lost its once famous thesis. 3 Technology looms large. Reminding us that Glenn Gould thought he could record a piano concerto without ever meeting another musician, that Andy Warhol dated appliances, and that Tamagotchis are something more than toys, Conrad discusses how machines have become more human and human beings more machine-like. He is at his wittiest and best on the subject of film, which he regards rightly as the preeminent art form of the modern age.