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THE MODERN/POSTMODERN DIALECTIC: AN ONLINE SYMPOSIUM
American Art and Culture, 1965-2000

Discussion Overview

ORGANIZATION
An international group of 35 renowned scholars, artists, and curators participated in this two week-long discussion. The conference offered scholars, curators, artists, and the interested public from all over the world an unprecedented opportunity to talk to and listen to each other. The discussion is now archived and anyone may view it.

MODERN/POSTMODERNISM DIALECTIC
For so many in the United States—cultural figures and lay people alike—the concept of postmodernism remains elusive and difficult. Over the past 30 years, the term has come to mean many things to scholars, artists, and writers. In the 1980s, postmodernism had become a kind of fad in the rarefied world of the art museum or the university. By the early-1990s, many writers—including the organizer of this conference—had abandoned the term entirely, seeing it as irrelevant or outmoded.

There is disagreement even among its proponents. Some have argued that postmodernism began with the radical aesthetic practices of 1960s and 1970s, while others suggest that its features were already present in the work of Marcel Duchamp and other transgressive artists of the modernist epoch. Some contend that postmodernism heralds the death of the self-indulgent, innately masculine artist-genius, or the birth of the art work as impassive cultural critique, or the end of painting and the preeminence of photography and other means of mechanical or electronic reproduction. Still others insist that it marks the reemergence of allegory as a form of social critique or see it as a metaphor for the triumph or, conversely, the destructiveness of consumer culture.

Given this multiplicity of viewpoints, is it really desirable or even possible to create an art historical definition of postmodernism? Is the term even useful to scholars and critics? The Modern/Postmodern Dialectic: American Art and Culture, 1965-2000 explored the artistic practices in the United States from the mid-1960s to the present in the context of the term postmodern: When and to what extent did modernism wane as a viable force in American art? How have the various liberation movements, from civil rights to feminism, influenced American art and culture and contributed to the rejection of the modernist ethos? How has globalism changed American art and culture? How have the new technologies of the past 50 years—television, personal computers, and the internet—altered the nature of progressive art in the United States? Are any of these changes innately postmodern? And, finally, is postmodernism a legitimate concept for defining American art over the past 35 years?