tradition

What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality. There remains to define this process of depersonalization and its relation to the sense of tradition. It is in this depersonalization that art may be said to approach the condition of science. T.S Eliot - Tradition and the Individual Talent (1922)

The modern artist is a figure also, of self-sacrifice. The emptying of the personal, the common or ordinary, the choice of the 'unseen over what is seen', and the need to open up to forces beyond the range of the rational as conceived at the moment, are perhaps examples of how religious motivations, were relocated to and redistributed within novel forms of artistic practise. Tradition is as present within modernity, as in pre-modernity, only its role is reversed, rather than the repository of valuable forms and norms, a bosom, it is perceived at best as something that can no longer bear continued repetiton or reproduction (to continue to do so is cliche), in this sense it becomes at worst perceived as a kind of vice, that the artist must break out of completely.
It's a question whether 'tradition' ever implied a reproductive model, perhaps this is the view of tradition that modernity has had to end up with - now that we seem to be moving away from any dialectical engagment with tradition at all.