Tropicália offers us an alternative narrative of Modernism, not only because it is a minor footnote in the constructed canon, but because it has managed to stay relatively open and flexible. This is by virtue of its own character, and because some of its problems are still to a certain extent ours. Modernism lingers on, in the never given balance between necessity and contingency, passivity and activity.

We have never been catechised: Rodrigo Nunes i Mute Magazine använder det brasialianska 60-talet för att polemisera mot den förenklade bild av modernismen som förmedlats av Victoria & Albert Museums utställning Modernism: Designing a new world:

This narrative excludes various threads from a definition of Modernism (Dada, Surrealism, Secession), reducing the Modernist event to a utopian program of the transformation of social life through technological development, functional design and planning. This operation of reduction reinforces a political equation of Modernism and totalitarianism that serves the double purpose of presenting Modernism as: i) a project imposed by authoritarian means on a moment of radical transformation that is inseparable from capitalist development, rather than as itself playing a part in constituting that moment of transformation; ii) posing questions which are impossible or impertinent in our present, ‘liberal-democratic’ world.