In previous posts I have been tracing the loss of the real, of narrative and of beauty as outcomes of Post-Modernism. In this post I wanted to continue this idea and look at the loss of high art.
As is often the case with Post-Modernism we need to briefly turn our attention to Modernism and review Modernism’s relationship to beauty.
With Modernism there was a tendency to critique beauty by looking at its opposite, namely the ugly or the grotesque. In conjunction with this, there was a critique of artistic control through randomness and a critique of reason through practicing automatic art, championing art born from dreams or from the insane.
With Post-Modernism these art practices mentioned above become authenticated as independent activities, free from a critique of beauty. Instead of existing in a vertical structure beneath beauty, they exist as equals in a horizontal relationship to beauty. No longer is beauty held up as the pinnacle by which artwork is judged.
Pop art began the great winding down of the project of Modernism and helped to usher in Post-Modernism. With Pop art there was widespread embrace of the objects of commercial activity as well as the introduction of irony. The everyday objects available from the market were introduced in an ironic fashion, in many cases just to test the openness of Modern Art theory, the buying public and supporting institutions.
One project of Post-Modernism was to dismantle the authority of institutions such as academia and museums. Once this final arbiter of taste was removed, there was no vertical relationship by which all art could be judged.
Some Post-Modern art activities include conceptual art, performance art and lowbrow art. Conceptual art often uses deconstructive techniques to attack the institutions of art and make explicit power relationships in cultures. Conceptual art also works with abstract relations that many times challenge any working definition of art. Performance art highlights the significance of every human endeavor or act. Many times performance artists work in a scatological way with the body and its material products (Mike Kelly). Lowbrow art most clearly foregrounds the loss of high art by putting forth objects that were consistently deemed low art, such as underground comics (R. Crumb) or punk aesthetics (Raymond Pettibon).
None of these movements are interested in beauty nor appealing to previous generation’s views of taste with its resulting evaluations of what is high art. With Post-Modernism comes the flattening of the field of art and an expanding of the definition of art to include most activities. This is the loss of high art.