Modern to Post-Modern to .....?

Modern Art

Modern Art started around 1855 and was superseded by post-modern art around 1970. In architecture, The Crystal Palace designed by Sir Joseph Paxton in England in 1855 first represented modern art. The date perhaps most commonly identified as marking the birth of modern art in painting is 1863, the year that Edouard Monet exhibited his painting Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe in the Salon des Refusés in Paris. Earlier dates have also been proposed, among them 1855, the year Gustav Courbet exhibited The Artist’s Studio. (Wikipedia)

All that can be really said is that modern art doesn’t really have a definite ‘start’ date. So many influences and movements around the world influenced the flux into modern art making it difficult to find a defining moment. I would say that modern art started in terms of painting when there was a distinct movement away from realism, around 1860. It became a phenomenon during the first impressionist show in 1874.

The pioneers of modern art were Romantics, Realists and Impressionists, all movements within Modern Art.

The main critic of the movement, at least between 1939 and 1960, was Clement Greenberg whose guiding principal, Formalism, argued that modern art is a complete break from representational art and is a pure expression of its own intrinsic values. In other words, the art is stripped of all associations with non-visual arts and external representational references. Therefore, according to Clement Greenberg, the mission of modern art is pure opticality.

The main principals of Modern Art is the point at which artists

1. felt free to trust their inner visions

2. expressed those visions in their work breaking with the ‘law’ of realism

3. used social issues and images from modern life as a source of subject matter

4. started to experiment and innovate as part of the artistic process

Some of the main artists of Modern Art are:

Christo, Picasso, Warhol, Brancusi, Rauschenberg, Oppenheim, Manet, Van Gogh, Calder, Conner,Motherwell, Rothko, Newman, Pollack, Gorky, Frankenthaler, Martin, Stella

Post-Modern Art

Post-Modern Art began in the 1970’s in contradiction to some aspects of modern art. It describes a series of movements that at the same time, arise from and react against or reject, trends in modernism such as purity, medium specificity, art for art’s sake, authenticity, universality, originality, and most important, paradox or avant-garde.

The status of the avant-garde is particularly controversial: many institutions argue that being visionary, forward-looking, cutting-edge, and progressive are crucial to the mission of art in the present, and therefore postmodern art contradicts the value of "art of our times". Postmodernism rejects the notion of advancement or progress in art per se, and thus aims to overturn the "myth of the avant-garde.

In my opinion it ended around the turn of the century in 2000.

Critics:

Rosalind Krauss – avant-gardism is over and the new artistic era is post-liberal and post-progress

Griselda Pollock

Characteristics:

1. Use of industrial materials and pop culture imagery

2. Rejects modernism’s grand narratives of artistic direction, eradicating the boundaries between high and low forms of art

3. All stances unstable and insincere and therefore, irony, parody and humor are the only positions that cannot be overturned by critique or revision.

4. Pluralism and diversity are defining features as well.

Artists:

Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Marcus Harvey, Gary Hume, Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami, Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Levine, Liam Gillick

Art of This Time – The Year 2010

The art of today is psychologically based and takes into account our level of consciousness and how it affects us and the global world.

The name I give it ISISM

It began when art critics, galleries, art historians and the artists themselves could no longer define a movement within the art world.

The main principals associated with Isism …

1. can no longer be judged as ‘good’ on any basis because it no longer adheres to a movement or a set of rules

2. uses all the past movement concepts and structures – everything can be used and will be used without reservation or retaliation

3. value of a piece of art is solely based on marketing and the art market and this has no relevance to the art world per se – completely separate and irrelevant to each other

4. art is global and personal at the same time and the meaning cannot be inferred without social, political and cultural context as well as individual psychology – the meaning becomes a matrix