DAY 352

PHILOSOPHY OF ART

Postmodern Aesthetics (Part 2)

AND YOU THOUGHT ART WAS SUBJECTIVE BEFORE!

“Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you. There was a reviewer a while back who wrote that my pictures didn’t have any beginning or any end. He didn’t mean it as a compliment, but it was.”

—Jackson Pollock

Postmodernism in art can refer to a few different things. As an adjective, postmodern is sometimes nothing more than a lazy synonym for eclectic or weird. More precisely, postmodern art signifies a reaction against the modern era’s idolization of reason and progress. In some way, whether through indistinct subject matter or unconventional composition, it reflects the tenets of postmodernism outlined in Part 1.

In recent philosophies of art and aesthetics, postmodernism has been a notable force. A variety of recent philosophers have drawn from Marxist politics and Freudian psychoanalysis to conclude that consumerism and the concept of self are detrimental to the postmodern worldview because they nourish a false sense of concrete reality. The postmodern view would be that the concept of self is simply a linguistic construct, and a misleading one at that. This leads to a deterioration of the subject/object dichotomy central to art in Modernism.

The artwork of Jackson Pollock and other Abstract Expressionist painters bears the hallmarks of postmodernism in its deliberate elusiveness—the room it leaves for interpretation. Barbara Kruger’s work, on the other hand, reflects postmodern ideals in the way it combines mixed media, disparate subject matter, and provocative messages that challenge our identities and social norms. —CKG