Trace the impact of technology and the new physics on the arts

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

As new technology transformed the way people lived at the end of the nineteenth century, so did the new physics change the way people saw the world and their places in it. Invention such as the telephone, wireless telegraphy, and the internal combustion engine helped modern cities swell in size, created a pace of living that was faster than ever before, and began the path to a global culture. Advances in scientific theory proved equally significant: atomic physics paved the way to the creation of the nuclear bomb, whose destructive power cast a long shadow over populations everywhere.
Fear of nuclear holocaust, a fast pace of life, and an emerging global identity were aspects of modern life that found their way into the arts. Early twentieth-century artists had little use for the self-indulgent sentiments of the nineteenth-century Romantics and the idealism of the Symbolists. The new style that was as conceptual as modern physics and emphasized the process of abstraction aimed to arrive at an intrinsic or essential form. Further, just as Einstein's theory of relativity had challenged Newtonian physics, artists sought to upend traditional and established aesthetics.