Blog #9 - Postmodernism

If we look at postmodernism as an art, rather than a period of time, for the sake of the question, then it can be looked at like this, it comes down to the person viewing the art. There are people out there that always like to gain some sort of meaning or see some sort of beauty in art, there are people who will see some sort of obversation about the time and get a meaning that not everyone else sees and give a little smirk to show they "get it", and then there are the people that will pretend to understand just cause they see someone else smiling and they feel they should be too so they will be seen as "getting it". Art is only truely art in the first impression of a person, because then they see it for the way they want to see it. The thing about that is, that only last for a few seconds until someone either gives their opinion and that person becomes inclined to agree so they don't look foolish, or they are influnced by the folk around them to feel a certain way by observing their reactions. Though that first impression, those few seconds, art had a first impression on us. I just stay to the far right and say all art is shit, that way I never find myself in this position.

To answer the seoncd part, wheather or not it is an reactionary or progressive phenonmenon, I would have to say; both mabe? A person could argue both ways. The examples given in the TT book like Seinfeld or Andy Warhol paintings could be looked at as things that took time to see just how they were, or weren't like the art they were associated with at the time. In that same effect you could also argue that these art forms were also so different from the norm once they came out that the initial reaction to them could not be ignored, thus giving them instant postmodernism credentials. Questions about these types of things, at least to me, come down to one thing, the initial reaction that the particular art form has on a person the very first time they view it. I think the term postmodernism works better and is more definable when used as a reference of a time period rather than a style, because when people put things in the term of history or time, we love to make things definate. When people put things in terms of an art form, we love to bitch and argue why something is or isn't something.

-Corte