After reading Christopher Beckwith’s Empires Of The Silk Road a while back, I’ve been wanting to read more books harshly critical of Modernist culture and art (as Beckwith’s book certainly is).
I don’t mind if the writer is a cantankerous, curmudgeonly old coot, as long as he (or she) also makes a genuinely compelling case.
I am NOT interested in satire, or anything too closely intertwined with American partisan politics.
Ps. I’ve already read Oswald Spengler. Good stuff, love him to death.
Some of it was way off the mark, but there’s a lot to like in Tom Wolfe’s From Bauhaus to Our House, which trashes modern architecture.
The prince of Wales had a BBC documentary in the 80s called A Vision of Britain: A Personal View of Architecture where he slammed down pretty hard on modernist architechture. There was a book too.
Wolfe also wrote a companion book which targets modern art directly: The Painted Word.
I haven’t read Beckwith’s Empires Of The Silk Road, but from looking at reviews of it such as this one (not to mention just considering the title) I am pretty sure that the “Modernist culture” of which it is critical is not the early 20th century art-architecture-literary movement known as Modernism (which is what the posters above me seem to thinking of – and which has been attacked both by conservative traditionalists like Prince Charles and Tom Wolfe, and by self-described “postmodernists”), but more what is more usually called something like Modern Western Civilization/Culture or Modernity. “Postmodernist” critiques of modernist (the late 20th century arts movement’s) aesthetics and the general critique of modernity and western civilization are not entirely unrelated but they are far from being the same thing. To an extent, “modernist” aesthetics saw itself as celebrating modernity (although there was a lot of critique of modernity thrown in there too), and certainly many postmodernists are concerned to criticize modernity as well as modernism. However, modernity is a much bigger, older thing, with far deeper historical roots than modernism, and while modernism is now largely dead, modernity most certainly lives on and thrives.
It is hard to know where to start in recommending critiques of western civilization or modernity. It is a very big target, such that critiques of aspects of it are everywhere, and even general attacks on the whole thing are very diverse, coming at it from very different angles or perspectives. Some people will see over-reliance on scientific rationalism as what is most fundamentally wrong with it, others, capitalism, and others … well, other things that don’t spring to my mind at the moment, but I am confident there are lots of them.
As I do not really know the basis of Beckwith’s objections to modernity (except, presumably, that the modernization of Asia is a sort of cultural imperialism by Europe and America), and, as the OP is presumably looking for critiques coming from a somewhat similar perspective, I do not know what, specifically, to recommend. (And I might well not know, even if I did have a better sense of where Beckwith is coming from.) However, I am pretty sure that Tom Wolfe and Prince Charles are not it.
Hard as it is to imagine that anyone loves Spengler, you’re probably best off by starting with his disciples. Here’s a page by Greg Johnson with some names to pursue. Francis Yockey is probably the foremost among them. Johnson’s Press appears to publish nothing but such books.
Oh but it is, it is!
Beckwith tears into Picasso, Pound, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot and the lot. The fact that he does so - and not just in passing! - in a book which ostensibly deals with, well, the Mongols and other Central Asian peoples, says, perhaps, a thing or two about the man’s passion, obsession, and/or eccentricity.
Having said that, I’m generally interested in critiques of both Modernism (á la Picasso et. al) and Modernity (as in the modern - Western - world), something which I probably should have made more clear in the OP.
I did love Prince Charles’ musings - and I’ll be blasted if the way he pronounces the word “empire”, at 01:28, isn’t the snobbiest goddamn thing I’ve ever heard! Wonderful stuff.
Will look into the Tom Wolfe books as well.
Steven Pinker uses evolutionary psychology to attack a wide range of Modernism in The Blank Slate.
I adore Spengler.
James Howard Kunstler generally hits the contemporary mark: he has a blog, Clusterfuck Nation — which has recently changed a bit. Generally a mistake to update either a brand or a website once it has a presence.
[ The blog bit is hidden in a drop-down there — remodelling is code for ‘making stuff difficult for the user’. ]
You know who else attacked modernism? 
Lenin ?
You might enjoy the work of Henry Pleasants, best known for ‘The Agony of Modern Music’.
You need to read What’s Wrong with Contemporary Art? by Peter Timms, a professional art critic.