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Many of the examples in this post are great examples of 'Modernist Art' and are decidedly not postmodern. This is roughly the equivalent of writing a post on "F
by Homunculiheaded 12y ago
Many of the examples in this post are great examples of 'Modernist Art' and are decidedly not postmodern. This is roughly the equivalent of writing a post on "Functional programming is Anti-Mind" and then demonstrating that with examples from the Gang of Four Design Patterns book.
The real issue with this is that most postmodern art is incredibly accessible. You don't need an art degree to think that Roy Lichtenstein's paintings "look cool", or that Campbell's Soup cans are "neat". One of the quintessential, textbook postmodern film directors is Quentin Tarantino; there are few directors more adored by the general public. Postmodernism is a descriptive term for artists who mostly reject the Western tradition of 'High Art'. Almost all the difficulty and "unintelligibility" lies in postmodern theory, but not in the art theorists consider postmodern. And I would argue that this is because theorists themselves are artifacts of Western high culture and are therefore unable to articulate a response to something that is outside this framework.
Almost all examples of "unintelligible" art fall into some subcategory of High Modernism. High Modernist schools of thought are almost always exploring questions within the context of Western high culture(ie the "What is art?" questions), and for many of these works you need to have a background in the art in question to really engage with and understand the piece.
If you want to critique postmodernism a good place to start is Fredric Jameson's "Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism".
- kibibu 12y agoThis is great! Would you say Dadaism and similar rejections are also postmodern? What about Stuckism, which rejects the idea that art is about concept and intention and should just be about pretty pictures? Honestly, I've never found a good explanation of what "postmodern" actually means, and your examples are helping.
- dreamfactory2 12y agoWhile I agree with the reply on the whole, many of its examples are pop art, which is a kind of shared space between modernism and postmodernism as far as art is concerned but not quite postmodernism, which explicitly rejects modernism. _But_ postmodernism originated in architecture and is more broadly a kind of 'end of history' movement, expressed not through the singular view and notion of purity of classicism, nor the idealist/utopian/revolutionary views of modernism - but through an embrace and often shocking (e.g. to notions of taste) juxtaposition of incongruent sources (e.g. classical motifs mixed with tiki references).
- gdubs 12y agoWas going to say, Pollock falls firmly within Abstract Expressionism -- about as "Modern Art" as you can get.
- stormbrew 12y agoYeah, I find this article confusing precisely because of its focus on what seems to be modern and not post-modern art. Post-modernism definitely, as far as I (as a layman, tbh) understand it, rejects a kind of hierarchy and structure, but it's not the art itself that it insists has no structure but the artist-viewer relationship. Modern art insists that the artist is telling and the viewer is receiving, thus why an apparent lack of structure can still be "about something", but post-modernism insists that the audience is an active participant in the art. And that's almost exactly the opposite of being 'anti-mind' to me. It gives the audience a kind of credit that a lot of other theories of art don't.