CHAPTER 36 SUPPLEMENT

AESTHETICS AND CRITICISM

Postmodernists set themselves apart from most all Modernist beliefs, attitudes and commitments

Generalizations (some meaningful, some not) about the differences between Postmodernist art and Modernist art

Postmodernists do not merely follow Modernists chronologically as Postimpressionists followed Impressionists

Modernists self-consciously threw off the past and strove for individual innovations in art making

Modernist critics and theorists tend to ignore the work of artists who are not working within the sanctioned theory of Modernism

Postmodernist critics and theorists embrace a much much wider array of art-making activities and projects

Postmodernists tend to be eclectic regarding media and freely gather imagery, techniques, and inspiration from a wide variety of sources - especially popular culture

Modernists generally DISDAIN popular culture
Modernists are often enthusiastic about the times during which they work, yet they think themselves and their art apart from and above the ordinary events of their day

Postmodernists are skeptical and critical of their times, and often deal with activist arts both in the social and political spheres

Postmodernists do not believe in the possibility of universal communication.

new cultural politics of difference is determined to "trash the monolithic and homogenous in the name of diversity, multiplicity and heterogeneity; to reject the abstract, general and universal in light of the concrete, specific and particular; and to historicize, contextualize and pluralize by highlighting the contingent, provisional, variable, tentative, shifting, and changing." quoted by Thelma Golden in "What's White?" in 1993 Biennial Exhibition catalog, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, 27.

from "Beyond Universalism in Art Criticism," by Karen Hamblen, the author explains that

postmodernist critics and theorists no longer believe that art can communicate without the participants having access to knowledge about the times in which the art was made and the places in which the art originated
critics not longer feel that they can interpret, let alone judge, art from societies other than their own without considerable anthropological knowledge
most critics now believe that art possesses characteristics and meanings based on its sociocultural contexts, and acknowledge that art has been interpreted differently in various times and places
critics are now likely to consider personality differences, socioeconomic backgrounds, genders, and religious affiliations of both art and audience (Modernist critics were Formalists, concentrating solely on the art object itself)
from Karen Hamblem, "Beyond Universalism in Art Criticism," in Pluralistic Approaches to Art Criticism, ed. Doug Blandy and Kristin Congdon (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1991).

Postmodernists are much more attuned to experiencers of art and how they respond to it
they prize variable understandings of the same work
Lucy Lippard sums to up:

"God forbid, the [Modernist] taboo seems to be saying, that the content of art be accessible to its audience. And God forbid that content mean something in social terms. Because if it did, that audience might expand, and art itself might escape from the ivory tower, from the clutches of the ruling/corporate class that releases and interprets it to the rest of the world." (quote from, Lucy Lippart, "Some Propaganda for Propaganda," in Visibly Female: Feminism and Art Today, ed. Hilary Robinson (New York: Universal, 1988), 184)