Classically the purpose of history was to evaluate facts and to asses causes and effects in order to describe and possibly understand events and the intentions of significant actors. Each historian had their own procedures and opinions about what constituted facts, causes, effects and so on. Some believed in a linear time scale and others insisted that time was cyclical. Regardless of the differences they proceeded by looking at the past in order to understand past events and their connections to the present (the time in which the historian lived). Post-Modernism breaks with this belief in a significant way.
Some Post-Modernist thinkers (i.e. Baudrillard) assert that the field of events is flattened so that countless events exist simultaneously. The idea is that there are innumerable amounts of information and data, so much that one cannot evaluate it or comprehend it. Competing and contradictory ideas exist simultaneously. A person exists with this information or data events but has no proper relationship to them. A person as a subject becomes lost to these events.
This Post-Modern attitude is expressed differently within each artistic discipline but some general characteristics are: a mixing of previous styles, use of irony or ambiguity and a preference for the artificial or synthetic over the organic or natural.
If the past is considered it is only as a reference wherein some superficial aspect is picked up and used by the artist. The beliefs, traditions and sustaining ideas of the past are unattached from their proper context. All is simultaneous synthetic data events and meaning is impossible. A result of this attitude is that the present is cut off from the past. This is the loss of the past.
