Book: Flemings Arts and Ideas Tenth Edition Mary Warner Marien William Fleming Publisher: Clark Baxter

Copyright 2005 Thomson Learning Inc

Post Modernism It is important to note that there is no post modern look, the way there was a shared rococo appearance in the visual arts. Post Modernism simply means after Modernism, and one problem in understanding it is that there have been several definitions of Modernism. Modernism in art is a collective term describing the major art movements from the middle of the nineteenth century to the 1970s. Over the long run, modern art seems to have become more and more concerned with pure form and less with subject matter. Post Modernism, then, covers several different tendencies, directions, and styles in late twentieth century art and thought. Although it means after Modernism, it usually implies an attitude set against some feature of Modernism. For example, where Modernism had been deliberately elitist and exclusive, post modernism was more populist and inclusive. It freely used images and motifs from popular culture and non-Western cultures, including those produced by mass media like film, photography and television. In addition, post-Modernism art embraced contradictions by employing complexity and ambiguity, paradox and irony, cynicism and whimsy. Postmodern art placed more emphasis on recognizable content and a wealth symbols and connotations. The post modern interest or the world of optical experience included a new alliance with nature and a fresh reappraisal of the human form.

Pop Art and Its Influences During the late 1950s and early 1960s artists such as Ramshemberg and Oldenburg highlighted Post war American prosperity and increased consumer spending by using household waste items in art or accentuating the desire to consume. By contrast, the British artist Richard Hamilton combined advertising images for mostly American products, such as television sets and vacuum cleaners. Hamiltons work introduced Pop Art which he defined as being popular, transient, expendable, low cost, mass-produced, youthful, witty, sexy, gimmicky, glamorous, and the product of big business.

Pop artists accepted mass-produced commodities as part of landscape of modern life. It offered easily recognizable subjects to which everyone could relate. As pop art gathered strength, it encouraged artists to think in terms of visual facts rather than the expression of inner feelings. Photorealism emerged during the mid-1960s and commanded attention for more than a decade. As the movement name implies, the group of photographs supplied the visual language of Photorealism. Minimalism The art that accompanied Pop Art and eventually succeeded it, looked nothing like its contemporary. Minimalist painting and sculpture rejected recognizable subject matter and emphasized pure form. Minimalism was, in a sense, a new or neoclassical movement, not because it sprang from eighteenth century neoclassicism but because Minimalists shared with the past an interest in purifying art forms and a predilection for basing art in mathematics and logic. OP or Optical Art -emerged in the mid-1960s and can be understood as a type of action painting, with the action taking place in the viewers eye. New Art Media Video became part of performance and installation art during the 1980s. Through the use of sophisticated technology, the once crude and jumpy images became lush and smooth. Artists were able to control color and make it more expressive. At the same time, technological advances allowed them to create interactive works. Although art video never achieved the pervasive presence of popular films, it has been integrated into galleries and museums. Digital Imaging -means many things to different artists. For Pedro Meyer, it is a device that allows him to convincingly join the past and the present as well as the mythological and the real. Other artists however, use digital media to point out that blind faith in the digital future is as misplaced and ominous as the earlier twentieth-century trust in nuclear power and space travel.