What is Post-Modernism?

"A late 20th Century style and conceptual theory in the arts and architecture, characterized by a general distrust of ideologies as well as a rather 'difficult' relationship with what constitutes art."

It sounds pretty simple. It's only when you start digging and discover sticky concepts like "modernity" (not the same as modernism) and "post-modernity" (different to postmodernism) that your head starts to spin. So let's skip the complex stuff and focus on a few essentials. Art historians, curators and postgraduate students of 20th century contemporary aesthetics, stop here!

Before explaining post-modernist art, let's talk about modern art - the style it replaced.

Modernism: Artists Believe Life and/or Art Has Meaning

Modernist art is usually associated with the era 1860-1960s - basically from Impressionism to half-way through the Pop-Art movement. Modernist artists (like all practitioners of modernism) believed in the fundamental scientific laws of reason and rational thought. They also believed that life had meaning - at least until the senseless butchery of World War I. (But see also Dada.) Even afterwards, they still believed that sufficient meaning could be rediscovered by a combination of unprejudiced rational thought and art. (A good example is Surrealism.)

Disillusionment Sets In

Unfortunately, by the mid-1960s, this confidence had wilted under the successive hammer blows of the Holocaust, post-colonial rigidity, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Vietnam War, causing people to become progressively more disillusioned about the inherent meaning and value of life (and art). Of course not everyone, and not all artists, became disillusioned. One group who maintained their faith was those in the upper reaches of the organizational hierarchies of society, including the arts. This naturally led to tension between them and others lower down.

The Postmodern Era

The post-60s period in the visual arts has been characterized by a number of factors:

• A widespread disillusionment with life, as well as the power of existing value-systems and/or technology to effect beneficial change. As a result, authority, expertise, knowledge and eminence of achievement has become discredited. Artists have become more and more wary about "big ideas." New styles of art have failed to attract them in the way that Impressionism, Expressionism, Cubism or Surrealism captured the imagination of earlier generations. Small is now good, so postmodernist schools have tended to be more local.

• New educational priorities, which began to emphasize the pursuit of skills rather than knowledge-for-its own sake. As a result, artists and art students became less interested in absorbing the traditions and craft of their subject, and instead focused on mastering production techniques. Individual creativity and interpretation have become as (or more) important than the gradual acquisition of painterly skills.

• The emergence of new image-based technologies (eg. Television, video, screen-printing, computers, the Internet), which generated a huge wave of film and photographic imagery - of places, events and international celebrities - and lessened reliance on draughtsmanship, in the process. By manipulating this new technology, artists (inc. painters, printmakers, sculptors and others involved in newer forms like installation) have been able to short-cut the traditional processes involved in "making art," but still create something new.

• The growth of consumerism and instant gratification over the last few decades of the 20th century has also had a huge impact on the visual arts. Modern consumers want novelty. They also want entertainment. In response, many artists, curators and other professionals have taken the opportunity to turn art into a "product." For example, installation and video have allowed consumers to experience art in a much more pro-active way. The public's desire to be shocked and stimulated has been met, if not satisfied, by new artistic subject-matter, like dead tiger sharks, huge ice-sculptures, crowds of nude bodies, demonstrations of dying flies, islands wrapped in pink polypropylene fabric, and so on. Whether these new so-called art forms actually constitute "art" remains a hotly contested issue. The avant-garde conceptualists say, "Yes", the traditionists say "No".

Postmodernism In a Nutshell

To paraphrase Andy Warhol, "anyone can be famous for 15 minutes". This idea, more than any other, sums up the postmodernist age. Faced with a new non-sensical world, the postmodernist response has been:

Okay, let's play around with this nonsense. We accept that life and art no longer have any obvious intrinsic meaning, but so what? Let's experiment, make art more interesting, and see where it leads. Who knows, maybe we can be famous for 15 minutes!

Impact of Postmodernism

The postmodern approach has proved extremely popular with many art students. Suddenly, instead of having to work tirelessly at honing their painterly skills in draughtsmanship, perspective, composition, color theory and all the other things required by traditional artists, they could dream up a nifty idea, issue a suitably "meaningful" manifesto and Bingo! They were famous. Or at least that's how it seemed.

Meanwhile those painters and sculptors who had acquired those painstaking traits, were iced by an arts establishment who embraced postmodernism with Italianesque rigor. Thus for example in Britain, in 2002, when the prestigious Turner Prize was won by Keith Tyson for his creation of a large black monolithic block filled with discarded computers, not a single painter had been considered as a possible recipient of the prize.

This cocktail of experimentation, focus on instant process, and enhanced communication facilities, has led inexorably to a huge shift in the way art is perceived, produced and promoted. Conceptualism is now a dominant force, and its advocates within the arts establishment are now in a position to determine what constitutes such important things as "innovation", or "outstanding art". One can't help feeling that the "meaning" of an artwork has now overtaken its aesthetic qualities, thus relegating the notion of craftsmanship to a second division form of art. This has significant implications, not just for art students seeking to acquire skills, but also for professional artists competing for public commissions and exhibition space.