Five Faces of ModernityFive Faces of Modernity is a series of semantic and cultural biographies of words that have taken on special significance in the last century and a half or so: modernity, avant garde, decadence, kitsch, and postmodernism. The concept of modernitythe notion that we, the living, are different and somehow superior to our predecessors and that our civilization is likely to be succeeded by one even superior to oursis a relatively recent Western invention