Eli5: What is modernism and post-modernism?
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Forget the terms themselves as they both insinuate a sort of “Now” that can be confusing.
“Modernism” was a style across multiple art forms that looked to ignore prior styles and attempt to interact with the audience in a “Fresh” way. It was intentionally confusing and “deconstructed” a sort of “back to basics” sort of way, and the intent was largely to find a new way for an audience to interact with the art. A simple example might be comparing a beautiful still life of flowers and fruit, painstaking crafted to be beautiful and natural looking (old art) to a bunch of lines and squares on an abstract canvas. What are you even looking at? It forces the audience to “see” what they imagine it is, one person sees a still life again, a different person sees a dog chasing a kite, a third sees The Battle of the Bulge from WWII. None of these interpretations are “Wrong”, it’s that the art is sort of *half complete* by the artist and the viewer needs to contribute the missing half from their imagination and lived experience. In doing to so that audience is a vital part of the art and they are more deeply involved in it. A literary example might be a Victorian author devoting 20 pages to describing a particularly vibrant sunset exactly as they see it vs. James Joyce only even mentioning a sunset by alluding to a conversation the characters had that isn’t even in the book.
“Post-Modernism” came later in which the same techniques were now mixed with prior art styles and created a fusion of old and new, using masterful traditional techniques to interact with audiences in new and different ways.
Despite the term “modern”, both genres were most popular in the early and mid 20th century and would be considered “old” genres in a contemporary sense.
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