![]() There was real vitality in these multifarious debates, not least in matters of critical theory, which was heterogeneous, especially in the anglophone context. ![]() Yet even as the Left was in political retreat, it had advanced on cultural fronts. What motivated the neocons above all was revenge against “the ’60s.” The problems of contemporary society, they claimed, were due to militant students, Black activists, and strident feminists, not, say, the ravages of advanced capitalism, and the necessary cure was a return to tradition, family, and moral values. With Thatcher, Reagan, and Kohl, neoliberalism had captured the levers of political power, and neoconservatives like Daniel Bell were ascendant ideologically. In other words, the discourse of postmodernism wasn’t hatched in the academy, even if it came to roost there, and it wasn’t conjured up by journalists and publicists, even if it came to serve the culture industry.Īlthough not as nihilistic as our libertarian present, the early 1980s was a time of deep reaction. Although academic presses soon produced related anthologies, these initial entries were issued by an independent publisher (Bay Press) and a contemporary museum (New Museum), respectively. The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, which I edited, was published forty years ago it was quickly followed by Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation (1984), assembled by Brian Wallis. On the other hand, this untimeliness makes the present a good moment to look back at postmodernism, if only to measure our distance from it. ![]() In some ways, postmodernism seems more historical than modernism, reanimated as modernism is by questions of colonialism, diaspora, and globality. THE NOTION OF POSTMODERNISM was once a great stimulant to art and thought today, it feels like another anti-aphrodisiac of the just past. © Jenny Holzer/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Jenny Holzer, Living: Some days you wake up and immediately.
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