The Brooklyn Rail

What is postmodernism? That’s a tricky question, because there isn’t really one answer. Postmodernism is defined by what it is not—modernism. Beyond that, it can mean just about anything to just about anyone. It is suspicious of, and blinkered toward, enlightenment rationale, and what its proponents deem the limitations of modernist ideals, yet offers no particular way forward; it is playful and giddy, but anarchic and destructive; and it is cynical of prevailing grand narratives, so it cannot become one, even though it wants to (at least not without hypocrisy). It is “everything everywhere all at once,” thereby absolving itself of any responsibility for what it spawns. It is the petulant teenager of isms.

And so, among scholars and philosophers there are multitudes of definitions of this most capricious of theories. For postmodernism read Legion, “for we are many.” And if Jesus couldn’t get a straight answer from infernal authorities, how is the person on the street expected to grasp its miasmic tenets? A more prescient question in the context of contemporary art is, does postmodernism matter?

My concern is that such densely layered, paradoxical, and contentious critical formulas distance an already purse-lipped, solipsistic art world from reaching new and untapped audiences. Art, at its zenith—which is exceedingly rare—distills challenging socio-political realities into a visual language that strikes the viewer with the emotional jolt of a pit viper. Only then might the onlooker subsume that experience into his own thinking, his own cultural surveillance, and perhaps even revise his prejudices. That is where art belongs: at the vanguard of society, coaxing, urging, and at times demanding change when it is not being met by government or populace. That is where art finds relevance. Anything that confuses or complicates this elusive aim is surplus to its role. This bridging of ideas with public consciousness ought to be an artist’s foremost endeavor, although very few will ever accomplish it because close to a hundred percent of art produced today is insignificant, other than in the provision of visual pleasure.

From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

That postmodernism is indefinable is a truism. However, it can be described as a set of critical, strategic and rhetorical practices employing concepts such as difference, repetition, the trace, the simulacrum, and hyperreality to destabilize other concepts such as presence, identity, historical progress, epistemic certainty, and the univocity of meaning.

While such opaque hypotheses are passed around the egos of academia like a party bottom, they remain to art what haute couture runway shows are to the average high street consumer. No one actually wears those pantomime costumes, although more accessible variants of them find their way into shopping malls. Similarly, some elements that proceed from elitist discourse and the aesthetic ripples it generates will filter down and influence literature, art, architecture, and music. Who wouldn’t be intrigued, for example, by the cut and thrust of modernism’s rejection of Victorian morals, its reaction to the devastation of WWI, and artists’ frenetic experimentation in response to the thunder and grease of the machine age? Their activities were fueled by a desire for new modes of expression as they grappled with the fast-changing world about them. The movements that modernism spurred—Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism, etc.—and their leading practitioners (Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, et al.) are fixed in the canonical firmament. Exhibitions of their work continue to bring in fantastic crowds, however knowledgeable—or not—a viewer may be as to the philosophical origins of what they are seeing. For, outside of the intelligentsia, no serious artist or audience member is concerned with such complexities, nor are they required in order to appreciate art. Indeed, during my graduate degree studies at Hunter College in New York, a professor of critical theory told the studio artists present not to try to weave her teachings into the principles underpinning their art because, while we’d be “tempted,” we were not clever enough to do so, and would make fools of ourselves. After dropped jaws had been retrieved from the floor, I found myself amused at her candor, and over time, in agreement with her cautionary note. If a painting arrests our attention and we wish to delve into the historic or metaphysical frameworks of its making, that is wonderful, but that investigation is only undertaken after the artwork has stimulated our feral instincts, our sensory registers, and we are captivated.

It’s a continual source of dismay when Uber drivers, city government workers, or friends of friends find out that I’m an art critic, and invariably reply with some version of “I don’t know anything about art.” Of course, they do. Everyone chooses what they hang on the walls of their home. Everyone knows what they like and dislike. It’s just that a hermetically sealed art establishment, bolstered by its lofty ideologies, impenetrable art speak, and jealous dictates of what is and is not worthwhile art have disarmed people from having the confidence to say so. It has always kept the public at arm’s length, to tamp down resistance to its often rickety predilections, and promote the fullest veneration for what is placed on museum walls. Isn’t that outstretched limb a little tired by now?