Postmodernism
In the late 1970s and 1980s, the idea of "postmodern" was applied to both the visual arts and architecture. Postmodernism in the visual arts constituted a reaction to modernist theory and a rejection of the twentieth-century avant-gardes. Modernism, notably as it was theorized by the American art critic Clement Greenberg, may be defined as a tendency to "use the specific methods of a discipline to criticize that same discipline." The criteria for a painting were thus flatness, the shape of the canvas, and the properties of the paint. The work was judged and determined by the internal logic of its medium. The avant-garde had been rooted in a logic of rupture and renewal throughout the twentieth century, and Postmodernism was a reaction against this linear history of art. Postmodern works were to draw freely on different preexisting historical styles, making subjectivity an essential criterion for judgment. The past became a simple repertory of forms. The paintings of the Italian Transavangardia and the architecture of Ricardo Bofill are characteristic of this approach. Postmodernism in art is a correlary of the Western way of life. In Le Postmoderne expliqué aux enfants (Postmodern explained to children), Jean-François Lyotard writes: "When power is called capital rather than the party, the Transavangardist or postmodern solution, . . . seems more appropriate than the antimodern solution. Eclecticism is the degree zero of contemporary culture--we listen to reggae, watch Westerns, eat MacDonald's at lunchtime and local dishes at night, wear Parisian perfume in Tokyo and retro clothes in Hong Kong, and knowledge is a subject for TV game shows. It is easy to find a public for eclectic works of art. By becoming kitsch, art flatters the reigning disorder of the art-lover's taste. The artist, the dealer, the critic, and the public delight in anything and everything; laxity is the order of the day. But this realism of anything and everything is that of money--for lack of aesthetic criteria, it remains possible and useful to measure the value of artworks by the profits they earn. This realism adjusts to all trends, like capital adjusts to all needs, as long as the trends and needs have buying power."