In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, at the beginning of the modernist era and of modern art, the avant-garde was characterized by its confidence and optimism about the future. The artists, writers and philosophers of this era held the firm belief that the industrial age was opening many new territories to explore and that art, in its most noble and explicit way, would find the necessary metaphors by which a radically changing culture could be explained. There was no sense that civilization would ever be threatened by the very forces that fueled their optimism. There were no statistics [...]