Postmodernism

(For the coffee table)

Postmodernism is dead, say some. They would include Edward Docx writing for Prospect Magazine (UK).

 In trying to "define" an era, this effort is aiming to make its 20/20 hindsight seem like an old prophecy fulfilled. Retrospective explanations have that funny way of making what they describe seem to have historical (or at least logical) inevitability.

I suspect that all the points I like about this article would still be in it in a major do-over, but the offramps to many of its dead ends would have to be removed. How to remove them? Be more careful about distinguishing why things that were being done were important to do, versus why the effects of what got done wound up being important.The two things might coincide, but in * practice* by actual artists they more often don't, and having two different kinds of importance doesn't invalidate either of them.

It's probably equally or even more important to hear about post-modernism from an intelligent do-er, not just from an intelligent consumer. Consumers might be tired of post-modernism, but it is almost entirely unlikely that artists will stop thinking and working that way. But whether very many people still care or not is a separate question.

This article at least suggests the issue on the surface: it implies the question "why should people care?" And the answer, which it also pointed out, is "because it changes the way they think about things." Left unspoken is that most of the audience for this article is, unfortunately, a relatively elite audience. So we don't just get to say "people care", and leave it at that; we call it what it is, and we decide to not ab-use it.

(Below, a gratuitous short do-over of the above, as posted in the comments on the article's website although it may not have been submitted and posted correctly.)

In reality, the audience for this article is a relatively elite one, which is important since the point of the article is to try to explain "why people have cared" about something other people did. Of course, the answer to "why" is that what some people did made other people think about things in a different way. That's a broadly applicable phenomenon of note, one that the article clearly tries to highlight. But let's be real about who we're pointing at: a minute fraction of the population of do-ers (artists) who survived the gauntlet of intellectual consumerism. While both parties included people who are dead serious about their intent, the idea that an "era" hit an end presupposes that these two special parties stopped aiming for each other. That's all.