MS3/MS4: Postmodern Theory - Useful Notes

Postmodernism: An Artistic Style

Postmodernist art reveals itself when:

1. It's self-referential. In other words, it refers to itself, or is about itself. Postmodernist artists often refuse to let their works be simply or totally about something else. Their works are about themselves as works of art, and they constantly draw attention to themselves as artifices instead of trying to be windows on some sort of reality beyond themselves.

2. It's "intertextual." That is, it's art that often likes to be about some other work of art, or some other "text." A famous pop artist named Roy Lichtenstein loved painting images taken right out of comic books. That's "intertextuality," he made art about somebody else's art.

3. It's category-defying, often in confusing ways. Postmodernist artists love to defy our expectations and do things they're not "supposed" to do -- maybe to remind us that the rational categorisations we often use to understand art never work as well or as perfectly as we like to think they do.

4. It's "pastiched." Fancy French word, that. "Pastiche," to recent art critics, is the practice of borrowing elements of different genres and different styles from lots of different historical periods, then mixing them all together in a single work of art. It creates a kind of historical collage.

5. It's not snobbish. In fact, postmodernist art can be very "pop." It often draws its subject matter from the realm of popular culture and employs pop-culture forms and genres. Most postmodernist artists don't draw the sorts of distinctions between "high" and "low" culture many artists of the past did -- and so they defy yet another mode of categorisation.

6. It gets fact and fiction all mixed up. Postmodernist artists aren't much interested in the distinction between real and make-believe. They often make famous "real" historical figures interact with fictional characters in their works, and they often re-tell "actual" textbook history in peculiar, unsettling, often illuminating ways. Mixing fact and fiction is a way to amplify this idea.

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