Contemporary Art Essays -- Post-Modernity Post Modernity

Contemporary Art Dealing with Post-Modernity Art knowledge bases consist of all told the people whose activities are necessary to theproduction of the characteristic works which that world, and peradventure 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 contemporaneousness like Modernism deconstructed artLike the Simpsons episode that informed Po-Mo as supernatural for the sake of weird,Postmodernism accepted the philosophy art for the sake of art. A in truth deliver anddemocratic practice, a natural response to the inhibiting Modernist intelligentsia. So stalk is this notion that it was banned in China during the Mao rule. Art by and byModernism became free to reference anything or nothing at all. It no longer needed ameaning or idea.It do es not mean, however, that Postmodernism 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 institution works, like the Freudian or Marxist views that science canexplain society. It rejects the image of cultural unity, of equality, and the view thatone person can address on behalf of humanity. Postmodernist art is skeptical of latecapitalism and the scientific 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 capital of Minnesota Foss and PaulPatton. New York 1983.Danto, Arthur. The Journal of Philosophy. Vol. 61, No. 19. American philosophicAssociation Eastern Division Sixty-First 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