Contemporary Art Essays -- Post-Modernity Post Modernity

Contemporary Art Dealing with Post-Modernity Art worlds consist of all the hatful whose activities are necessary to theproduction of the characteristic kit and caboodle which that world, and perhaps others aswell, define as art. By observing how an art world makes those distinctionsrather than trying to make them ourselves we can understand much of whatgoes on in that world.... The basic unit of analysis, then, is an art world.- Howard Becker (Art Worlds)Postmodernism deconstructs Modernism like Modernism deconstructed artLike the Simpsons episode that explained Po-Mo as weird for the sake of weird,Postmodernism accepted the philosophy art for the sake of art. A very free anddemocratic practice, a natural response to the inhibiting Modernist intelligentsia. Soradical is this notion that it was outlaw in China during the Mao rule. Art afterModernism became free to reference anything or nothing at all. It no longer needed ameaning or idea.It does not mean, however, that Postmodern ism itself is free of Ideology. It is areaction to Modernism. It analyses and comments on it. Postmodernism rejectsmeta-narratives of history, culture, and national identity that were present inModernist art. It rejects totalizing theories that are to explain the way people act andthe way the universe works, like the Freudian or Marxist views that science canexplain society. It rejects the concept of cultural unity, of equality, and the view thatone soulfulness can speak on behalf of humanity. Postmodernist art is skeptical of latecapitalism and the technological industrial progression. It critiques the concept ofindividualism, and encourages people to consider multiple identities. It embracesthe concept of mul... ...the linear narrative of art history.Works CitedBaudillard, Jean. The Precession of Simulacra. Translated by Paul Foss and PaulPatton. New York 1983.Danto, Arthur. The Journal of Philosophy. Vol. 61, No. 19. American philosophicalAssociation Eastern Division Sixty-Firs t Annual Meeting. (Oct. 15, 1964). pp. 571-584. Accessed online, 05/10/08. Howard Becker. Art Worlds. Berkeley, CA Univ. of California Press, 1982Irvine, Martin. Lectures, Essays, and Seminar Notes. Georgetown University.Accessed online, 05/11/08. Jameson, Frederick. Marxism and the Historicity of Theory. New Literary HistoryAccessed online, 05/12/08./StructuralistMarxism/Jameson/Jameson.htm