(no subject)
(...)
If the hallmarks of modernism were high seriousness, ardent intellectualism, a religious desire for transcendence, and an elitist disdain for popular taste, postmodernism, which emerged in the 1950s and 1960s, is playful and often camp. The high modernists had seen themselves as the new priests of a fallen world, reverently shoring up its fragments against the ruins; postmodernism is a creature of television and the Internet, where everybody gets to be famous for fifteen minutes and irony is the antidote to angst.
Postmodernism is postexistential in that it takes the sense of life's randomness and meaninglessness for granted, and deconstructive in that it takes aporia (a critical term much beloved by the deconstructionists that literally means "difficulty" or "impasse" in Greek; they use it to describe the inevitable collapse of any text into self-contradiction) as its very method.
The pop art of the 1960s embraced images from advertising and commerce; conceptual artists like Jeff Koons (b. 1955) incorporate pornography and kitsch into their deliberately provocative creations. Form no longer follows function in architecture; buildings are a pastiche of styles: the Chippendale pediment atop the ATT Building, designed by Philip Johnson (1906-2005), pokes fun at the glass and steel boxes beside it in the New York City skyline; Robert Venturi's Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966) called for a "both/and" style, which "can include elements that are both good and awkward, big and little, closed and open, continuous and articulated, round and square, structural and spatial.
In music, the recording studio is no longer the passive recipient of sound but a musical instrument in its own right - a whole art form, hip-hop, is based on sampling and dubbing. High modernists might have disparaged rap music for its commercial vulgarity, its pandering to the lowest common denominator, or critiqued it for its false consciousness, its failure to recognize that its valorization of violence and sexism and bling makes it complicit in the oppression of the very social class that performs and consumes it; postmodernists cheerfully emulate its spirit in their own endeavors.
Postmodernist literature is wildly allusive (and self-referential); the novels of Thomas Pynchon (b. 1937), Kurt Vonnegut (b. 1922), David Foster Wallace (b. 1962), Italo Calvino (1923-85) and Don DeLillo (b. 1936) play with time and space and causality; they're abuzz with the ambient noise of pop culture and, at the same time, hyperaware of themselves as artifacts - the author is explicitly or implicitly present in their texts as the man behind the curtain.
If modernism is an umbrella term that embraces a huge swath of culture and time, postmodernism is less useful. It's more of a buzzword in that it describes a particular (but by no means universal) tendency in contemporary art. Don DeLillo's White Noise (1985) epitomizes many of the attitudes of postmodernism, for example, but the same author's Underworld (1997) is as high modern as James Joyce's Ulysses (1922).
- Arthur Goldwag, 'Isms and 'Ologies (2007), under "Modernism."