Postmodernism is dead

[e]

 

http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2011/07/postmodernism-is-dead-va-...

 

 

[Nicole]

Thanks. I will try to track that down...

Thomas said:

Possibly the Munich-based choir Kapelle Antiqua, Nicole.  Maybe another.  You can read about the lawsuits from the sampled artists on Wikipedia.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enigma_%28musical_project%29

[infimitas]

Integral post-postmodern epistemology?  More accurate, perhaps, but doesn't exactly roll off the tongue.  Besides, like it or not, "postmetaphysics" is here to stay.  Wilber has popularised it and now we have to use it to attract attention.  No time to say more now...

[Hertzschuch]

Nicely written text. I think the guy quite skillfully explained in simple words the concept.

 

I had never made the connection between de-construction and the rise of banality in art forms. It seems so obvious I wonder where my brain cells where!?! 

It is interesting that the author wishes for something beyond postmodernism, but his description of the next step is so vague, as if words and concept fail, which is of course normal- we're all a bit in that situation. "Authenticity", yes, of course, and....?

I'm a bit off topic with your discussion here, but I guess I don't really get it. I think words and adequate conceptualisation will rise spontaneously in time, when the new vision/paradigm/phase will be embodied.

P.

 

[Nicole]

Exactly, Patrick.

Patrick said:

Nicely written text. I think the guy quite skillfully explained in simple words the concept.

 

I had never made the connection between de-construction and the rise of banality in art forms. It seems so obvious I wonder where my brain cells where!?! 

It is interesting that the author wishes for something beyond postmodernism, but his description of the next step is so vague, as if words and concept fail, which is of course normal- we're all a bit in that situation. "Authenticity", yes, of course, and....?

I'm a bit off topic with your discussion here, but I guess I don't really get it. I think words and adequate conceptualisation will rise spontaneously in time, when the new vision/paradigm/phase will be embodied.

P.

 

[Edward theurj Berge]

I tried to access the article just now but it seems the site is down, so cannot comment specifically. It would seem from the comments that pomo art is banal and lacks specificity, values and authenticity. I studies pomo literature in college and to claim it is banal and lacks those qualities requires the most astounding blinders imaginable, as it is the very definition of specific, local narratives and values that arise from being authentically within such contexts. One example comes to mind for now (but there are countless others), Amy Tan's Joy Luck Club, which was a quintessential example of pomo literature in the department and anything but banal and being an exemplar par excellence of those qualities pomo isn't suppose to have. I don't know if the author of this piece gave examples but even if so, there would no doubt be examples of bad pomo art and literature just as there are from any “era.” But to label the entire genre with those descriptors is indeed bad pomo criticism itself.

 

As for Tom's lame analysis of pomo, it is laughable in light of the very discussion we had in the QE thread, where he agreed no less with ample evidence that deconstuction indeed deconstructs itself and is a negation of negation. How memory fades when one has an ideological agenda. And postmetaphysics doesn't negate metaphysics but recontextualizes it, i.e., negates its negative dichotomy. His definition ironically classifies postmetaphysics within a classically dualistic and metaphysical framework interpreted (rationalized) as quantum complementarity. He doesn't get to redefine the terms around here, for anyone but himself, that is. Or to rename the forum. If he wants a forum with his revelatory (religious) agenda then he go create one and see who shows up.

[Lol]

theurj, in case you still can't access the article, here's a short section from its beginning section:

" ...properly understood, postmodernism is playful, intelligent, funny and fascinating. From Grace Jones to Lady Gaga, from Andy Warhol to Gilbert and George, from Paul Auster to David Foster Wallace, its influence has been everywhere and continues. It has been the dominant idea of our age.

So what was it? Well, the best way to begin to understand postmodernism is with reference to what went before: modernism. Unlike, say, the Enlightenment or Romanticism, postmodernism (even as a word) summons up the movement it intends to overturn. In this way, postmodernism might be seen as the delayed germination of an older seed, planted by artists like Marcel Duchamp, during modernism’s high noon of the 1920s and 1930s. (Seen in this light, the start-date that the V&A offers for postmodernism—1970—is quite late.)

Thus, if modernists like Picasso and Cézanne focused on design, hierarchy, mastery, the one-off, then postmodernists, such as Andy Warhol and Willem de Kooning, were concerned with collage, chance, anarchy, repetition. If modernists such as Virginia Woolf relished depth and metaphysics, then postmodernists such as Martin Amis favoured surface and irony. As for composers, modernists like Béla Bartók were hieratic and formalist, and postmodernists, like John Adams, were playful and interested in deconstructing. In other words, modernism preferred connoisseurship, tended to be European and dealt in universals. Postmodernism preferred commodity and America, and embraced as many circumstances as the world contained.

In the beginning, postmodernism was not merely ironical, merely gesture, some kind of clever sham, a hotchpotch for the sake of it. It became these things later in lesser works by lesser artists: Michael Nyman, Takashi Murakami, Tracey Emin and Jonathan Safran Foer. Rather, in the beginning artists, philosophers, linguists, writers and musicians were bound up in a movement of great force that sought to break with the past, and which did so with great energy. A new and radical permissiveness was the result. Postmodernism was a high-energy revolt, an attack, a strategy for destruction. It was a set of critical and rhetorical practices that sought to destabilise the modernist touchstones of identity, historical progress and epistemic certainty.

Above all, it was a way of thinking and making that sought to strip privilege from any one ethos and to deny the consensus of taste. Like all the big ideas, it was an artistic tendency that grew to take on social and political significance. As Ihab Hassan, the Egyptian-American philosopher, has said, there moved through this (our) period “a vast will to un-making, affecting the body politic, the body cognitive, the erotic body, the individual psyche, the entire realm of discourse in the west.” "

[Hertzschuch]

There's a simple way to access it: once on google, there's a little blue button that says in french "en cache", I guess in english it's cache also..I don't know. Basically, under the adress of the article, in google, you can access a file that google keeps for long.

 

Personnally I wasn't refering to pomo art as being banal in itself. I was just thinking about the fact that an avatar of postmodernism, which was the democratisation and de-hierarchisation of art, has lead us to a situation where anybody can call his paintings, music and so on, art. This is good in the sense that all can developp and practice things that used to be reserved to an elite. But it also creates a situation where people who don't have much to say, can flood the market.

The writer links this aspects of pomo with consumerism and capitalism, with the selling figures being the only criteria of succes.

 

Patrick

[Edward theurj Berge]

My impression is that pomo provides a severe critique of both consumerism and capitalism, as well as holding the highest standards for what is described as literature. Go figure.

Lady Gaga, used as an example in the article, only appears to be kitchy but is making a statement about the very consumerist and capitalistic fashionista culture in which she finds herself; said culture should more properly be named modernist than post. And her music as well; she is classically trained and very much into quality as well as creative production.