Modernism absorbs a lot of body blows these days, and one UK critic recently claimed that the art movement was responsible for “more human misery than anything else in history.” Hyperbole aside, though, was modernism really a bad thing? “The arguments boil down to claims that Modernism was inhuman, authoritarian and technically inept. But if it was really so bad, and if it was really confined to a tiny and irrelevant coterie, why does it look so good [in museum shows today,] and why was it so all-pervasive in its influence? Above all, why are its critics still so worried about it?”