What on earth is postmodernism?
In: 13
When I think of modernism, I apply the art world to it in relation to historical context. A key factor of modernism is it’s response to a rapidly changing world. You have people taking much more interest in the introspective, and the general departure humans are taking from the traditional. We see a focus on how we move through the world (futurism), the idea of perspective (cubism), the absurdity of the mind (surrealism), and an emphasis self through our focus on the artist as the medium.
For people living through modernism, life brought up questions about different cultures, the capability to travel the world, changes in how we function as inter-and intra-societally. They witnessed the technological advancement of the world from cavalries in world war 1 in the 1910’s to chemical warfare, tanks, atomic bombs, long distance radio signals, flight bombers, etc. for these people, the traditional way of life was incompatible with the attempts to modernize so they conceived a world in which their role was pliable, and ever changing.
Post-modernism is difficult to define, as it is a response to modernism, and I would argue that we have been living in it since the 1960’s.
I find that the art we see now is one that focuses on the individuals plight in an unstable world. Unlike the artists we see in modernism, there’s a great sense of distrust in institutions. We can see that there’s a heavy influence among the surrealists for communist governments in modernist work, but it is exacerbated more recently with distrust in any and all institutions: we don’t know what truth is anymore so we recede into the only perspective we have- our own. There we war with our reality and that of others. We question ourselves there into absurdity.
There’s an meme infographic I really like that compares the themes of romanticism, modernism, and post-modernism. Essentially, post-modernism is the human plight of shaping reality.
[conflict in literature](https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/77tgoy/conflict_in_literature/)
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