charles1 wrote:
well... postmodernism, in short, is a rejection of the modernist tendency to categorize the world.
lol pretty much summed up my second year Crit Studies essay. It isn't so cut and dry though. P-modernism is a pretty complicated movement but yeah basically it's a reaction to (against) Modernist values mixed up with the influence of the development of mass industrialization and mass media. Throwing away old values of collectivism and archetypal 'universal' themes and a focus on individualism, subjective experience and interpretation; as well as an evolution of the accepted arena of what art mediums could be, i.e. earthwork and conceptual art (the latter arguably pioneered much earlier in later modernism by Duchamp and other Dadaists).
The idea that 'nothing is new' isn't originally a post-modern perspective though it's a debate that's been going on since right back in the classical age. A good example of this is the use of a Camera Obscura as a device to mimic reality, showing an incentive to express art as a reflection of reality which is essentially the same driving principle that 'nothing is new'.
P-modernism is much more about art being the conceptual space between the 'art' and the observer, in as much as the art it's self is merely the perfunctory realization of the artists original intentions of imparting an experience upon the observer. The experience it's self being the 'art', the 'concept' is the art, as it were. Where the values are much more about the subjective experience of the individual as opposed to a 'universal language of art', which was a corner stone of Modernist perspective. So although the whole concept of art existing as a regurgitation of older themes exists within the post modern value set, it isn't what you could call a 'main' theme, nor was it developed as a post-modern perspective, it simply exists as an accepted value within the Post Modern movement.
It is of course a lot deeper than this but I can't really be assed to go in to it in any more depth.
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