Nut Meg’s Reviews > Decadence: A Very Short Introduction > Status Update

The legacy of decadence is both as " a pop-culture celebration of social transgression and a philosophical critique of the errors and excesses of modernity."

"Because of its conflicted sense of modernity, decadence emerges as a kind of dark humanism, the decadent paradigm of decline and decay forming a universal that the progressive, hopeful paradigm of traditional humanism cannot hope to match."

Klimt's style"became ever more decorative and ornate, often to the point of overwhelming the human figure. Indeed, the dominance of artifice in his portraits of wealthy Viennese women, in which the the human form fights a losing battle against stylization and ornamentation, makes decadent a readily descriptive term for Klimt's late paintings."

"The elegant decadence of Vienna 1900, like those repressed, conflicted urbanites Sigmund Freud analyzed, seems genteel in comparison to the energetic decadence of 1920s Berlin, whose citizens and denizens act as though they have nothing to lose, having lost everything already."