What I have been tracing so far in previous posts are two things: the various critical issues confronting art during the 20th century and the emergence of Post-Modernism. What I want to look at here is the broad landscape of Post-Modernism.
There are many diverse thinkers in Post-Modernism, three in particular (Derrida, Lyotard and Baudrillard) steadily influenced artists from the 1970s to today. Derrida analyzed language and turned it back on itself to reveal hidden assumptions and motivations (deconstruction), Lyotard focused on the loss of authority brought on by vast amounts of information available in the marketplace, and Baudrillard asserted what we experience is a simulation brought on by the real undercut by the interchangeability of signs. What each thinker shares is that they all challenged pre-Modern notions of what is real (an objective state of things knowable through investigatory acts such as science). These abstruse ideas filtered into the artworld as investigations of media, advertising, words and images.
Post-Modern art tends to move away from painting and sculpture and towards photography, video art, text-based art and performance art. Photography has taken up where Realism left off; namely, by doing social documentation. Video art explores the arena of image and simulation. Text-based art emphasizes words and ideas separated from actions and images. Performance art tries to reclaim the value of human action with antics that often are undermined by their own confusing and meaningless gestures. When painting is practiced narrative with a fixed meaning is often set aside for open-ended collage.