Does Post Modernism mean nothing new or original is

[WCGreen]

possible.....

Okay, I can't sleep....

So I start thinking about all these so called eras in art and culture, are they truly the same or mutually exclusive....

And this post modernism really struck me as being odd... It's more of a phase, instead of a delineation of artistic and cultural styles and temperment...

So really, MTV, TV, the movies, literature... All of this seems to be just variations on a theme....

A theme explored better and more succinctly before....

Okay, I need to try and get back to sleep....

[billyskank]

1. Postmodernism is merely an intellectual veneer

to hide ugly cynicism.

[WCGreen]

2. Well said.....

[mitchum]

23. and the worst part is that it is secondhand cynicism

not even hard won through experience

[norml]

3. Q: Does Post Modernism mean nothing?

A: Yes

[LaraMN]

4. This is what you're thinking about when you're trying to sleep?!

Geez! I think about Johnny Depp or someone I wouldn't mind dreaming about (since I have whacked-out med. dreams.) Stop thinking so hard!

[WCGreen]

5. I should never try to read the Fucking New Yorker before

I try to sleep....

God Damn Susan Sontag and her God Damn Pseudo intelectualism.....

[Spider Jerusalem]

6. Actually, "postmodernism" is a sort of blanket term...

used to describe cultural, artistic, and intellectual developments that are a progression from the early-to-mid-20th century modernist movement or a reaction to it. From Frank Lloyd Wright to Frank Gehry; from James Joyce to Thomas Pynchon; from Edgard Varese to Philip Glass; from Ludwig Wittgenstein to Jacques Derrida. Pop culture for the most part doesn't really fit in with most serious postmodernism, except in the sense that it's largely deconstructivist and sort of a "remix" culture, if you will, building from the ruins of the old rather than starting with a clean sheet.

[billyskank]

7. Nothing starts with a clean sheet

Everything builds upon what went before. We are not different from our forebears.

[Spider Jerusalem]

12. Yes, I know...

key difference here being 'building out of' as opposed to 'building upon'. Like taking the marble of the Parthenon and making a new building out of it (but you're stuck with the friezes and the columns and so on, so you can still tell what it was before).

[billyskank]

15. It's just that

we tend to look on what happened in the past more favourably probably than contemporaries did at the time. I can't remember who said it, but 90 per cent of everything is crap. For sure most of pop culture is dross, but when we are all dead all of the dross will be forgotten forever, and only the few really good things will be remembered. And people in the future will say, ah, things ain't what they used to be.
:)

[Spider Jerusalem]

16. Yeah, they never were, though...

and I certainly agree with what you're saying; we remember Shakespeare and Jonson and Marlowe and Webster, but the OTHER Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights? May as well have not existed, for the most part. Mozart and Beethoven's contemporaries and their music? Minor footnotes, and not performed in a hundred years or more. The lasting works of the human mind in the arts...which encompass culture both high and low...are those which are impervious to shifting tastes and fashions, that manage to transcend the epoch of their creation. There aren't many of those, now or ever, in comparison to the totality of what's produced. But there ARE still a few diamonds in the dunghill.

[WCGreen]

17. Like Abba and the Monkeys....

[WCGreen]

8. Pop Culture is devoid of feeling....

It is just a rehash of the tried and true.....

Each new thing is just repackaged old stuff......

[Spider Jerusalem]

9. 'There is nothing new under the sun.'

Ecclesiastes, if I'm not mistaken. So we've had this problem for 3000 years or so. The biggest problem with pop culture is that it's too pervasive. There's too damned much of it. Too many movies, too many television series, too many novels, for the people who actually ARE managing to tell what are at heart old stories in new and interesting ways to really get noticed. The signal-to-noise ratio is kind of low. And since pop culture IS so pervasive, it gets a little hard to filter the static.

[In_The_Wind]

10. Did you know ...

Some identify the burgeoning anti-establishment movements of the 1960s as the earliest trend out of cultural modernity toward post modernism.

[billyskank]

11. I love it when you talk dirty!

:loveya:

[In_The_Wind]

14. Be_Still_My_Heart!

well ...

not totally still ...

ya know what I mean ~ Billy :loveya:

[WCGreen]

13. Rebellion always brings about a wrinkle in the zeitgeist

[Deja Q]

18. Most of today's technologies are lame "innovations" than inventions.

And "innovation" makes the products seem better than they are.

A cell phone isn't an invention. It's a telephone using radio beam rather than a long cord for transmission. It also allows for more car accidents and non-thinking when pushing a shopping cart.

A DVD burner is like a CD burner; just holds more to keep up with our bloated operating system and office products.

A LCD screen merely replaces a CRT; it adds nothing new - except cost of repair should too many dead pixels, stuck pixels, or backlight burnouts occur. :D

Most "real" inventions stopped a long time ago; since then we've only made adaptations to existing ideas. There is no money in ideas. Only product efficiency. And the cost of.

[TallahasseeGrannie]

19. I think post-modernism

is a label that self-important artisste-types place on their work to make trash and lack of skill and craft acceptable.

But I think the Emperor is naked as a jaybird and not well-endowed.

[WCGreen]

20. Hey Size isn;t everything.....

Unless you are Jackson Pollack

[TallahasseeGrannie]

21. LOL

But I do hear "Big Dick Cheney" is well named.

[mitchum]

22. It's just "artistic" license to be unoriginal

[WCGreen]

24. Stylistic masturbation

[WCGreen]

25. Stylistic masturbation

[jane_pippin]

26. I don't know, but I think post-modernism is over. It may not know it yet,

but if it's on MTV or available on a baby-tee at Sears I think it's a sure bet it's toast.

That doesn't mean that there isn't a thriving "underground," however. There is. It's just that you'd never know it by paying attention to accepted arbiters of cool/popularity, (like Rolling Stone, your local art museum, etc.)

That's just my theory, and I just woke up so keep in mind I may not have explained myself very well.