Quote Originally Posted by sailor jack View Post
I would also like to ask the big question "What is art?". I am talking specifically about the postmodern works and if they can truly be called "artistic". Is it a natural conclusion reached through the course of changing ideas? What will come after it? What will we describe as post-postmodern?
Well, in my opinion, PoMo is not an independent cultural movement in the same way I would argue Modernism was and is, but rather a reaction to modernism across a wide variety of disciplines.
In literature, whilst Modernism is to me characterised by a deliberate subversion of the themes and styles of "traditional" literature (and so I would naturally see Don Quixote as the first Modern novel, subverting the traditional "Knight Errantry" Genre as it does), culminating in writers like Joyce; to me PoMo in literature is broadly characterised by a loss of these themes and styles (You see the distinction, Modernism subverts tradition but recognises it, whereas Postmodern works struggle to accept OR dispatch with tradition). As an example I would present The Satanic Verses, which struggles to unite traditional Indian concepts with those of modern Britain, but also struggles to recognise either tradition at all.
In Philosophy, Modernism is characterised by confidence in the ability to know and the flourishing of huge systems of thought (the biggest being Positivism in it's confidence of True Knowledge and it's naive assumption that human thought is inevitably progressing, becoming more scientific etc., Existentialism and Phenomenology in their championing of human experience and subjectivity, and I would argue Hegelian Idealism (although appearing much earlier) bears the traits of Modernist thoughts, championing an Absolute Idealism replete with a totally teleological history culminating in knowledge of Absolute Spirit). PoMo is again a reaction, this time characterised by a rejection of any confidence of knowledge, focused on individual subjects rather than totalities, preoccupied with the dislocation between author and work, trying to pull the subjective and the objective back together, an undercurrent of pessimism and so on (See Derrida and Baudrillard).
In Art, the Modernist tendency is away from traditional forms of representation such as romanticism and classicism and towards the disjointed, the irrational, the non-representative, the geometrical as opposed to the representative, proportional, the rational. For me the ultimate examples of this are Mondrian and Matisse. By contrast, the Postmodern loses all sense of the canon whatsoever (i.e. the loss of a "high" and "low" distinction), attempts to imitate traditional styles become kitsch by default, traditional kitsch is, by contrast, exalted, art refers more to other pieces of art than to anything in the "real world", and artists become preoccupied with the Art Gallery (for me, this is the meaning of "modern Art" like urinals in public and so on, it is a fascination with the way in which anything becomes art when it is put where art belongs and/or is expected i.e. coming from an artist, being on display in a gallery).
To me, then, the "postmodern" is Art, but it is art only responding to and in light of Modernism, it is art trying to find itself again. Art has become unsure of what art is and that is why it is preoccupied with places of display and the privileged position of the artist, as this is an indication of where art comes from and where it is put, in the absence of knowledge of what it is.
The post-postmodern will likely be characterised by historical holism, the rehabilitation of a canon, the interplay of different historical periods with each other, less irony and less intellectual distance from itself. In essence it will be syncretic (the appropriate historical analogy would be scholasticism's uniting Greek philosophy with Christian theology). This is what I predict not only for art but across the whole spectrum of fields, and in fact I see The Satanic Verses, mentioned above, as an early indication of this sort of reconciliation.
But I admit that I don't really know that much about the subject (especially in relation to art) and that this post was full of generalities, suppositions and speculations.