Mod - Post-Mod

Material Girls
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_aqOTVKebY&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CQHIP-38jA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZyhrYis509A&feature=fvwrel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVBsypHzF3U
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Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes both a set of cultural tendencies and an array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The term encompasses the activities and output of those who felt the "traditional" forms of art, architecture, literature, religious faith, social organization and daily life were becoming outdated in the new economic, social and political conditions of an emerging fully industrialized world.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernism
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Modernism
Beginning as white, male european value system has expanded and become a globally dominate ideology.
It values and devalues the following;
+/-
+ Progressive & new / - Traditional
+ Material / - Spirtual
+ Individual / - Social
+ Abstract / - Wholistic

Post Modernism can be seen as a critique (and yet a continuation) of Modernism

It questions the following without replacing the above value system;

Avant-garde, originality and appropriation

Gender and sexuality

Cultural identity, nationality and race

Class, economics and politics

Environment and material consumption
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Postmodernism was originally a reaction to modernism. Largely influenced by the Western European "disillusionment" induced by World War II, postmodernism refers to a cultural, intellectual, or artistic state lacking a clear central hierarchy or organizing principle and embodying extreme complexity, contradiction, ambiguity, diversity, interconnectedness or interreferentiality,[4] in a way that is often indistinguishable from a parody of itself.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernity
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The status of the avant-garde is particularly controversial: many institutions argue that being visionary, forward-looking, cutting-edge, and progressive are crucial to the mission of art in the present, and therefore postmodern art contradicts the value of "art of our times". Postmodernism rejects the notion of advancement or progress in art per se, and thus aims to overturn the "myth of the avant-garde". Rosalind Krauss was one of the important enunciators of the view that avant-gardism was over, and that the new artistic era is post-liberal and post-progress.[21] One characteristic of postmodern art is its conflation of high and low culture through the use of industrial materials and pop culture imagery.
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One compact definition is that postmodernism rejects modernism's grand narratives of artistic direction, eradicating the boundaries between high and low forms of art, and disrupting genre's conventions with collision, collage, and fragmentation. Postmodern art holds that all stances are unstable and insincere, and therefore irony, parody, and humor are the only positions that cannot be overturned by critique or revision. "Pluralism and diversity" are other defining features.[28]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodern_art
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If you want to know more about the how and why of Po-Mo I strongly suggest you read Sandro Bocola's great final chapter of 'The Art of Modernism' @
http://www.sandrobocola-booksonline.com/CSS/page10_eng.html
also see
http://witcombe.sbc.edu/modernism/endofart.html
& maybe
http://churchmousec.wordpress.com/2009/08/21/john-macarthur-on-postmodernism/
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George Seurat
A Sunday on La Grande Jatte 1884-86
Oil on canvas
81 3/4 x 121 1/4 in. (207.5 x 308.1 cm)
http://www.webexhibits.org/colorart/jatte.html
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Chris Jordan
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGl62LuQask&feature=related
http://www.chrisjordan.com/gallery/epu/#e-pluribus-unum