It's much more complex than I can state in a forum - largely because there were many currents, and undercurrents, of social, philosophical and political thought in Europe in the pre- and interwar years. But as Comte said, "To understand a science, it is necessary to know its history." The same is true of aesthetics.
Thanks for both of your answers (
#774 and
#775). They present the aesthetic propositions of the modernist combatants at face value. I see it differently. To me it seems more likely that the aesthetic theories themselves were beside the point. They were the most effective weapons that could be found to hand at the time for use in combat in the wars of
generational succession in the bourgeois hierarchies of establishment art. I don't have time today to write about this but it so happens that in the last few minutes of our recent discussion of
Exit Through The Gift Shop, Banksy's 2010 movie about Banksy, Gav got his cat all excited as he quoted Trotsky's critique of Futurism from
Literature and Revolution. If you're interested it's in the last 8 minutes
here which you can also find in most podcast apps.
This is not to say that the modernists' critiques of establishment aesthetics lacked all merit. That's not my point at all. My point is that the fight was not only about aesthetics, it was a fight for control of the institutions that get to define establishment aesthetics in which a young generation wanted to take over.