What is ART? Part 1

MODERNISM & POSTMODERNISM

MODERNISM:

1860s to the 1970s

Art in which the traditions of the past have been thrown aside in a spirit of experimentation. Modern artists experimented with new ways of seeing and with fresh ideas about the nature of materials and functions of art.

INCLUDES:

Impressionism

Art Nouveau

Expersionism, Abstract Expressionism

Fauvism

Cubism

Surrealism

POSTMODERNISM:

Postmodern art is a body of art movements that sought to contradict some aspects of modernism or some aspects that emerged or developed in its aftermath.

INCLUDES:

Pop Art

Appropriation

Folk Art

Performace Art

Collage

There are several characteristics which lend art to being postmodern; these include bricolage (the construction or creation of a work from a diverse range of things that happen to be available), the use of words prominently as the central artistic element, collage, simplification, appropriation, performance art, the recycling of past styles and themes in a modern-day context, as well as the break-up of the barrier between fine and high arts and low art and popular culture.

One compact definition is that postmodernism rejects modernism's grand narratives of artistic direction, eradicating the boundaries between high and low forms of art, and disrupting genre's conventions with collision, collage, and fragmentation. Postmodern art holds that all stances are unstable and insincere, and therefore irony, parody, and humor are the only positions that cannot be overturned by critique or revision.