postmodernism

Epoch in the arts (1970-1990) defined by a radical questioning of absolute truth and metaphysical key concepts which led to relativism, apathy and ironic distancing.

Hard-boiled wonderland, blue velvet and the end of postmodernism

Art, Theory / By / September 28, 2012

It has become somewhat of an axiom to associate certain artistic practices to specific discourses, and specific artists to certain sensibilities. It has become a truism, for instance, to link practices as diverse as eclecticism, parody, pastiche, detachment, flexi-narrative, and parataxis to the postmodern, and strategies like ‘optimism’, self-consciousness, formalism, functionalism, purism, and streams of …

Hard-boiled wonderland, blue velvet and the end of postmodernism Read More »

The New Weird Generation (I)

Music / By / September 14, 2011

In the documentary The Eternal Children (see also ‘CocoRosie’), Antony Hegarty, lead singer of the pop ensemble Antony and the Johnsons, perceives the waning of a postmodern sensibility, and the rise of something else.

The wondrous post of Anis Shivani

Literature / By / September 12, 2011

Anis Shivani. Very keen critic or very angry (or disappointed, or hurt, or ‘misunderstood’) author? You decide. At least his damning critique of pomo writing is very, very funny. Read for example what he has to say about celebrated poet John Ashbery:

Strategies of the metamodern

Art, Theory / By / September 28, 2012

The modern is associated with politics as diverse as utopism, formalism, functionalism, seriality, art for art’s sake, the flaneur, syntaxis, restlessness, alienation, streams of consciousness, the cinematic apparatus, cubism, Reason, trauma, mass production, and schizophrenia. The postmodern tends to be associated with strategies as varied as dystopism, late capitalist flexibilisation, the ‘end of history’, formalism, …

Strategies of the metamodern Read More »

David Thorpe

Art / By / January 20, 2012

I remember the day I was introduced to David Thorpe’s work. It was winter, but it felt like autumn. I was reading one of those pieces of writing you were supposed to read as an aspiring philosopher in the early 2000s. I think it was Lyotard’s interpretation of the sublime. So I was thinking of …

David Thorpe Read More »

Introduction to metamodernism

Misc. / By / September 13, 2011

The postmodern years of plenty, pastiche and parataxis are over. In fact, if we are to believe the many academics, critics and pundits whose books and essays describe the decline and demise of the postmodern, they have been over for quite a while now. But if these commentators agree the postmodern condition has been abandoned, …

Introduction to metamodernism Read More »