'Modernism and Postmodernism' | Notes

Barrett, T. (1997) 'Modernism and Postmodernism: An Overview with Art Examples' in Hutchens, J and Suggs, M. eds (1997) (italics) Art Education: Context and Practice in a Postmodern Era. NAEA: Washington

pg 17. 'The major movements and events of modernity are democracy, capitalism, industrialization, science, and urbanization'

'The rallying flags of modernity are freedom and the individual'

'There is no unified theory of postmodernity'

'Postmodernism does not merely chronologically follow modernism, it reacts against modernism, and might better be called anti-modernism'


pg 18. 'Postmodernists criticize modernity by citing the suffering and misery of peasants under monarchies, and later the oppression of workers under capitalist industrialization, the exclusion of women from the public sphere, the colonization of other lands by imperialists and, ultimately, the destruction of indigenous peoples'

'Postmodernists claim that modernity leads to social practices and institutions that legitimate domination and control by a powerful few over the many'


pg 20. 'Postmodernist psychology also rejects the modernist notion that the individual is a unified rational being'

'Postmodernists instead decenter the individual and claim that the self is merely an effect of language, social relations, and the unconscious..'

CINDY SHERMAN : 'Much of Cindy Sherman's art is photographs of herself which undermine notions of individuality. In "Untitled Film Stills," 1977-1980, she pictures herself, but as a woman in a wide variety of guises from hitchhiker to housewife. These pictures look like stills from old movies. They are pictures of Cindy Sherman, and pictures of Cindy Sherman disguised as others, and they are also pictures of women as women are represented in cultural artifacts such as movies and magazines and paintings, and especially as pictured by male producers, directors, editors, painters, and photographers. They are about "the cultural construction of femininity" (Heartney, 1987, p. 18)

Untitled Film Still #48 (1979), Untitled Film Still #54 (1980), Cindy Sherman

'Modernism emerged amidst the social and political revolution sweeping Europe. Western European culture was becoming more urban and less rural, industrial rather than agrarian'


pg 23. 'Arthur Danto (1992) credits Warhol with bringing about "the end of art"...'


pg 24. 'Danto specifically credits Brillo Boxes with the end of modernism because with it Warhol made the philosophical statement that one could no longer tell the difference between an ordinary object and an art object just by looking at it'

• Warhol and Pop Art broke down the barriers, the hierarchies, the elitism that had pervaded the arts and creative culture for a very long time. More everyday, accessible, mundane.

Brillo Boxes (1964), Andy Warhol

pg 25-26. 'A central postmodernist strategy is known by the term "appropriation." By appropriating or borrowing or plagiarizing or stealing, postmodernists remind us that the notion of originality is absent in most traditions of art'


pg 26. 'Modernists throw off the past and strive for individual innovations in their art making'

'Postmodernists are generally content to borrow from the past and are challenged by putting old information into new contexts and creating new meaning