How Does Mechanical Reproduction Change the Way That Art Is Experienced

Beginnings

The starting time signs of postmodernism were axiomatic in the early on-twenty^thursday century with Dada artists who ridiculed the fine art institution with their anarchic actions and irreverent performances. The term, however, was non used in the contemporary sense until 1979 in the philosopher J.F. Lyotard'southward The Postmodern Condition. In fine art, the term is commonly practical to movements that emerged first in the late 1950s in reaction to the perceived failures and/or excesses of the modernist epoch.

Modernism

From the late-19^th to the mid-xx^th century, art every bit well as literature, science, and philosophy was defined by a sense of progress and technological advancement, brought about by the industrial revolution and affiliation with the positivity of modern life. Artists such as Paul Cézanne and Piet Mondrian strove to find a universal ways of expression through the increasing abstraction of their subject area. Other artists who focused on the subjective and the forbidden, such as Salvador Dalí or Marcel Duchamp were seen as outliers in this emphasis on progress and rationality and their work became precursors to postmodernism. By the 1930s in certain artistic circles, the process of painting, once the means to depict a subject through the apply of line, color, and class, became the discipline itself. This emphasis on formalism was outset observed and championed in the U.S. by Cloudless Greenberg, an art critic and fierce proponent of modernism. His theoretical writings are often seen equally the antithesis of postmodernism because of their advocating of artistic purity and for their singular focus on formalism at the expense of subject matter. By the time the Abstract Expressionists were painting (not yet fancy) in New York lofts in the 1940s, representation had been entirely eliminated in favor of a direct gestural expression that focused on paint application rather than narrative. Cardinal to the modernist avant-garde artist was individuality, autonomy, and the tendency for radical experimentation in search of an ultimate truth or meaning.

The Modernist-Postmodernist Crossover

By the heart of the century, the Western earth had experienced a major paradigm shift: two devastating globe wars, millions of lives lost, communist ideologies shattered, and nuclear weapons utilized. The modernist optimism that had dominated in a pre-war earth at present seemed irrelevant, outdated, and doomed to neglect. Europe was no longer the middle of modernistic art or the advanced. The focus of the art world now moved to New York City and to the Abstruse Expressionists who were flourishing in a new era of reinvigorated post-war commercialism. This grouping, notwithstanding, was nonetheless very much marked by their modernism, with the movement staunchly supported by Greenberg as a high fine art toward which all art had been inexorably moving since the 19^thursday century. Meanwhile, outside this high art enclave, America in the 1950s was experiencing a consumerist and cultural blast equally well equally a stormy political climate. Once Abstruse Expressionism became a mainstream movement, immature artists began to question it for its lack of reference both to the state of the world and to the flourishing popular culture of which its artists were a part. Motivated by these feelings and with a desire to create an art that acknowledged everyday life, artists such as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg began to experiment with new styles that borrowed and recreated imagery from the mass culture that surrounded them. The Neo-Dada way with which they would become associated was arguably the beginning of the genuinely postmodern fine art movements. These artists were influenced by John Cage, and many of their experiments would give ascent to Pop art and Minimalism.

Concepts, Styles, and Trends

Postmodernism cannot be described equally a coherent movement and lacks definitive characteristics. It can be better understood instead every bit a set of styles and attitudes that were affiliated in their reaction against modernism. A new approach to pop culture and the mass media emerged in the 1950s, sparking a wave of art movements that reintroduced representation from disparate sources and experimented with epitome, spectacle, artful codes, disciplinary boundaries, originality, and viewer interest in means that challenged previous definitions of fine art.

Loftier vs. Low culture

"Loftier culture" is a term used to describe traditional fine arts, such every bit painting and sculpture. The term is commonly employed by the art critic to evoke course, quality, and actuality. It is also used to distinguish types of art media and disciplines from the "depression," "kitsch," or popular culture of mass-produced commodities, magazines, television, and pulp fiction that took America by tempest in the post-war consumerist smash. In his definitive 1939 essay 'Avant-Garde and Kitsch,' Clement Greenberg warned the modernist avant-garde against association with what he considered philistine outpourings. Greenberg proposed instead that artists' concerns should exist reserved for an art that could transform society. The postmodernists, in response, embraced the "popular" wholeheartedly and made it central to their work. Pop artists recreated the mundane objects of consumerism, only used sense of humour and irony to transform these into gigantic soft forms (Claes Oldenburg) or into cultural icons (Andy Warhol) while the Minimalists used industrial materials to create repetitive forms reminiscent of the industrial product line. The "popular" emerged as both the subject and the medium for many artists and commercialism was embraced. This focus on "low" civilization stretched the definition of art, while besides providing social critique.

Image and Spectacle

In this new era of consumerism and television, advertising and the mass media became increasingly pervasive. In 1968, for example, the American public witnessed uncensored footage of the Vietnam War in their ain homes for the first fourth dimension, providing a stark disconnect with their own comfortable lives as they witnessed the horrors of war over dinner. Images on the screen were reflecting a new reality and it was often more difficult to distinguish between fact and fiction, particularly with the widespread use of advertising. Jean Baudrillard, a prominent French philosopher, called this state of affairs "hyperreality," likening postmodern existence to a flickering Idiot box screen: immediate, shifting, and fragmented, with no underlying truth. These new ideas inspired artists, such as Barbara Kruger, who began to draw the surface rather than any truth or deeper significant. Fashion and spectacle, rather than substance, was where significant was created. This focus on surface is one of the cardinal components of Kruger's I Shop therefore I Am (1987) too every bit much of Pop art. Simultaneously, a campsite artful was born, peculiarly axiomatic in fashion and music, that drew from past styles of Gothic and Bizarre; the more dazzling, flamboyant, and shocking - the more constructive. The piece of work of Jeff Koons is a good example of this aspect of postmodern art.

Mixing of Artful Codes

Modernism had kickoff emerged in 19^thursday century France in rebellion against the historical and figurative preoccupation of the French University and its dominance over artistic taste. The avant-garde movements that followed in the early-twenty^th century gradually eliminated whatsoever references to a context or subject area, in search of a pure and unmediated course of visual expression that was radical and new. This trend reached its apogee with Abstract Expressionism, which championed non-representational painting. However, in the decades that followed the movement, painting as a medium was considered platitude with picayune room left for experimentation. With the advent of postmodernism, some artists began exploring past styles and media - particularly painting - as function of the postmodern artful that brought dorsum both the historical and the subjective simply with a purposeful lack of stylistic integrity or unity.

Artists such equally Gerhard Richter playfully mixed aesthetic codes and genres, displacing existing meaning in structures and creating new ones. Using methods of parody and pastiche, onetime ideas could be recreated in new contexts. As the Dadaists had done earlier, other artists used collage, assemblage, and bricolage that juxtaposed text, image, and found objects to create layered surfaces. This mixing of codes is especially evident in the architecture of the 1980s and 1990s, such as The Sainsbury Fly of the National Gallery, U.k. that combines features from two different historical periods into one visual spectacle. In motion picture, the event could be enhanced considerably. For instance, Quentin Tarantino'due south, Lurid Fiction (1994) defies traditional narrative, drawing from multiple genres and offering a fragmented montage of characters and plots in an capricious order. Many artists too turned to multimedia technologies during the 1960s and 1970s, relishing the new opportunities that they were afforded to combine media and to create spectacle and sensation.

There were not simply opportunities with new multimedia technologies; from the 1950s and 1960s onwards, there was a significant crossover between artistic disciplines as traditional categories were superseded. A popular postmodernist phrase was "anything goes," which referred both to this growing convergence civilisation as well as to the collapse of the distinction between "expert" and "bad" taste and the difficulty of assigning value or judging works of art based on traditional criteria equally in the example with Jeff Koons. Artists adopted the mechanisms of both art and non-fine art forms, such as advertisement, using a multitude of media to convey multiple messages.

Originality and Authenticity

In 1917, Marcel Duchamp placed a urinal signed with a fictional proper noun in an showroom and called it art. In doing so he mocked the entire foundations on which the institution of art had been congenital. Traditionally, uniqueness and originality gave an artwork its value or "aura," both in symbolic and monetary terms, and was a concept preserved through modernist art criticism. In 1936, cultural theorist, Walter Benjamin, wrote a seminal essay entitled "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," which radically reworked this view, laying charges of elitism at the feet of cardinal figures such equally Greenberg. Benjamin claimed that mechanical reproduction, through printing and other methods, could attain the democratization of art because of its lower commodity value and increased accessibility to the masses. (The fact that ane could afford to purchase, for example, a poster of Van Gogh'due south Sunflowers, and then hang that reproduction on their own living room wall, would be a cause for celebration for Benjamin.)

Pop artists, Minimalists, Performance artists, Conceptual artists, and others adopted Benjamin'southward ethos, interpreting his words through a diverse range of media and techniques that undermined concepts of authenticity and value and distorted commoditization. Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol mass-produced bags and mugs, screen printed with iconic imagery. Donald Judd and Sol LeWitt exhibited their repetitive forms, but left control of their system to the curator; Allan Kaprow, Marina Abramović, and the Fluxus artists put on performances in which the audition and non the artist determined their form and meaning. Artists of all stripes, including Warhol, Richter, and Koons, were known for their appropriation of photographic and other imagery. Within Feminist art of the 1970s and again in the 1990s, amidst certain artists there was a surge of interest in the idea of collective authorship that farther undermined traditional ideas of creativity and creative genius that had been in place since the Renaissance. Artists such every bit Daniel Buren were increasingly concerned with the social process of art making rather than the art object, and placed the creation of meaning at the indicate of interaction. This new practice became known every bit Relational Aesthetics, and resisted commoditization of art through its performative nature, providing a powerful criticism of the art world, a field that came to be known every bit institutional critique.

Poststructuralism

The philosophical arm of postmodernism stems from intellectual shifts in France that occurred during the second half of the 1960s. The concept of poststructuralism is associated with the likes of Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and Jacques Derrida. Simply information technology was Barthes's 1967 essay, "The Death of the Author" - in which he famously proposed that the birth of the reader must come at the cost of the expiry of the author - that brought about something of a revolution in the way we think about, and interpret, art. For Barthes, works of literature or art (or whatever text for that matter) were never original simply rather fabricated up of "a tissue of quotations" from previous and existing works.

For Barthes, so, to "impose" an author on a text merely express its telescopic whereas the text had the potential to offer infinite reading possibilities (structuralism had proposed rather that past deconstructing a text semiologically and then one could uncover a single "fixed" societal meaning/structure). The conventionalities that the private interpreted the text for themselves - the idea, in Barthes'due south words, that a text's significant lay "not in its origin but in its destination" - led thus to revisionist accounts of a canon that was hitherto dominated by the life stories of the not bad (typically white) men of western art. Many have questioned the validity of Barthes'south claims (Barthes himself even admitted that when reading "I desire the writer"), and fifty-fifty though the author never literally died (postmodernists became the new authors after all), his essay ushered in the era of critical theory whereby "truths" (plural) challenged the idea of "truth" (singular). Poststructuralism supported thus the thought of pluralism and gave special impetus to those theorists and artists interested in pursuing ideas relating to "otherness" and identity politics.

Pluralism

The postmodern pursuit for a autonomous fine art extended across reproduction, cribbing, and experiments in collective authorship. Postmodernism coincided with the ascent in Feminism, the Ceremonious Rights motion, Queer theory, the fight for LGBT rights and postcolonial theory, and provoked a phone call for a more pluralistic approach to art. Many artists, such as Kara Walker and Felix Gonzalez-Torres, began to address subjects from multiple perspectives. The commonage impact on the arts was an increased representation of various, multicultural identities and also a playful treatment of identity and the self. This trope was possibly most evident in the early works of artists such as Barbara Kruger or Cindy Sherman. Information technology is especially truthful of Sherman whose work focuses on the rift between an identity synthetic through film or other media and the lived experience of women. Sherman's goal is to draw her audition'southward attention to the means of image production and that image's potential for a fluid – or "polysemic" - handling. Sherman's work thus resists the master narratives of fine art history and undermines the authority of the artist.

Later Developments

There are currently 2 main theoretical approaches to understanding postmodernism, its relation to modernism, and its place in the contemporary art world.

Continual Build-up on Modernism

1 statement is that postmodernism both disrupts and continues modernism as there is evidence of both existing in gimmicky art, which is a term that broadly refers to any fine art created within the final twenty years, thus encompassing all art production of whatever mode. The attitudes and styles that mark postmodernism can be understood every bit paradigmatic shifts that marker a rupture or crunch in cultural history. From this viewpoint, the bear upon of postmodern, post-colonial and postal service-feminist theory has sparked a sea of change in fine art, described by feminist writers such equally Rosalind Krauss and Suzanne Lacy. Certainly, the diverse, imperceptible, globally focused, cross disciplinary, and collaborative nature of gimmicky art practise is informed by postmodernist attitudes and appears both persistent and transformative. Postmodernism claims to close the gap between "high" and "low" culture and "adept" and "bad" gustatory modality, nevertheless there is evidence that these distinctions remain.

For example, in the early on 1990s, a group of immature Goldsmiths Higher students put together a graduate show called Sensations – information technology was what we might consider a highly postmodern concept. The reaction to the exhibition was unprecedented. Public and critics alike expressed outrage at the provocative imagery and explicit references to subjects of "bad" sense of taste. The group became known equally the Immature British Artists (YBAs) and sparked a revival in Conceptual Art using daze tactics to question art'southward significant, as Duchamp had done nearly lxxx years before. Their notoriety has persisted, as has the furor over Sensations, providing evidence for some that the old gustatory modality hierarchies of modernism live on. With this argument, postmodernism has not displaced modernism only is rather an extension of it.

The Age of Post Postmodernism

Another view, which has recently emerged in a small-scale but persuasive torso of writing, argues that nosotros have moved into a "post postmodernist" era. Some writers and critics merits that postmodernism is outdated and they question the value of a movement sustained by superficiality, cynicism, and nihilism. Some even argue for a return to the principles of modernism, admitting in different forms. Edward Docx calls this post-postmodern era the "Age of Actuality" characterized past a revival of authenticity and adroitness over style and concept. Other monikers include "alter modernism," which is Nicolas Bourriaud's term for the "nonstop communication and globalization" civilization of today, and "pseudo modernism," which was coined by Alan Kirby. Kirby claims there has been a shift from audition spectatorship to a more active all the same niggling participation, citing as evidence the reality-Boob tube-watching culture. These attempts to claim the finish of postmodernism are wide-ranging and by and large nonconsensual simply are united in elements of their critique of the postmodern concept. Weary of the relentlessness of postmodern irony and cynicism, these critics yearn for some return to truth and authenticity. In different ways albeit, they undermine postmodernism's dominance equally a way of thinking or as an attitude to life, reducing information technology instead to one motion in a long history of movements, one that is now in refuse.

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Source: https://www.theartstory.org/definition/postmodernism/history-and-concepts/

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