Acceptance of the indispensability of interpretation in appreciating artworks (not to mention simply recognizing them as art) opened a Pandora's box that is now called "postmodernism," a point of view that calls into question two centuries of assumptions about the elite and special nature of art. While the term "postmodern" is used (and abused) as indiscriminately as "modern" used to be, postmodernists are united by a belief that the "high-art" or modernist view I have just described is untenable and unacceptable. But they do not advocate a return to pre-Enlightenment views. Postmodernism is not simply another "ism" or movement. Instead, it is a declaration of the end of all isms and movements, of the impossibility of further theory. The postmodernists claim to reflect a pluralistic, rootless society whose consumerism, proliferation of media and media images, multinational capitalistic economy, and so forth make it vastly unlike any society that has previously existed.
Postmodernists eschew the very idea of overarching explanatory schemes (which they call "metalanguages," "metanarratives," or "meta-theories") by which facts or things can be connected or understood. They distinguish instead a plurality of discourses that belong to different "interpretive communities" (Fish 1980), each of which has its own parti pris, its own axioms to grind and fields to till. Hence any "truth" or "reality" is really only a point of view—a "representation" that comes to us mediated and conditioned by our language, our social institutions, the assumptions that characterize individuals as members of a nation, a race, a gender, a class, a profession, a religious body, a particular historical period. Artists, just like everybody else, do not see the world in any singularly privileged or objectively truthful way, but rather—just like everybody else—interpret it according to their individual and cultural sensibilities. What is more, since individual interpretations are derivative, people cannot even find a unique private world or style to express any more. All the "new" styles and worlds have already been invented (Jameson 1983).
For the postmodernist what has been enshrined as "high" art is nothing more than a restricted canon of works that largely represents the world-view of elite, Western European, white males. Writers such as Joyce, Eliot, and Lawrence who have been accorded the status of "masters" are merely individual voices who offer restricted points of view, many of which today sound sexist, racist, politically conservative or reactionary, or otherwise unacceptable. Terms such as "taste" and "beauty" and "art for art's sake" are constructions that express class interests. To claim that one can appreciate works arising from alien cultures is an imperialistic act of appropriation: one falsifies the alien work by focusing on those of its many characteristics that appeal to one's own standards while ignorantly ignoring or, even worse, dismissing the characteristics that were the standards for their makers and users. Art is not universal, but conceptually constructed by individuals whose perceptions are necessarily limited and parochial.
As a result of the discovery that modernist aesthetics masks chauvinistic, authoritarian, and repressive attitudes toward uneducated, nonestablishment, and non-Western people and toward women, post-modernist artists have thus set out deliberately to subvert or "problematize" the old "high-art" standards, often by parodying or otherwise flouting them. For example, instead of trying to create enduring, "timeless" works of art, postmodern artists deliberately create intermittent or impermanent works that have to be activated by the spectator or that cease to exist when the performance is over. Eschewing the site specification and religious aura of the museum, art is created on the street, in remote deserts, or found in humble or trivial objects and materials.
Postmodernist artists challenge the integrity of individual arts by using hybrid mediums—sculptures made of painted canvas, or paintings made of words and numbers. Artists challenge the high-art concepts of uniqueness and originality by copying, photographing, or otherwise appropriating images from past art for their new works, or by making many repetitions or reproductions of an image or construction. They create "pastiches" in the styles of earlier artists and present them baldly and unapologetically, without satirical intent, indeed usually without any social or aesthetic justification. They make works out of fragments that have no apparent relation to one another except for their juxtaposition.
Although the label "postmodernism" is relatively recent, postmodernist theory and practice was foreshadowed early in this century and even before this century. What seemed at the time a shocking (or amusing) aberration, Marcel Duchamp's Fountain—the infamous urinal displayed in 1917 at the New York Society of Independent Artists exhibition—can now be recognized as a crack in the dike of high art that in the past two or three decades has released an ever increasing flood of antiestablishment theory and realizations-of-theory (i.e., works of art).
The works and ideas that are called postmodernist can be lamented or ignored, but like modernism's works and ideas, they certainly reflect the society that gave birth to them. In light of the political calamities and barbarisms of the mid—twentieth century—totalitarianism of the right and left, genocide, the possibility of nuclear annihilation—the modernists' faith in human intelligence and their belief in the progress and perfectibility of human existence seem as antiquated and untenable as medieval theology. Socialism and, more recently, other underclass movements have challenged democratic societies' pretensions to providing objective, universal justice or equal protection under the law. As for virtue, the recurrent scandals at the very heart of democratic government suggest that morality is as difficult to unite with power as it has ever been. Freud's theories have made it hard for thinking people to believe that objective rationality alone could drive human affairs. The explanatory success of relativity theory in physics suggests the theme of relativity everywhere, including the fields of philosophy and ethics. The polluting fungoid spread of the automobile and its concrete accoutrements of freeway and parking lot over city and landscape, not to mention other even worse environmental ills, certainly calls into question the wisdom of human technological domination over nature. The proliferation of images in advertisements and on television make all events—from an exciting new dentifrice or room freshener to a fire in the Bronx, a missile attack on Tel Aviv, Johnny Carson's monologue, a famine in Africa, the Superbowl, or an earthquake in Peru—appear equally real (or unreal), occurring as they do in succession, compressed in time and space and significance.
To be sure, modernist artists certainly recognized confusion, multiplicity, and relativity: one has only to read the novels of Joyce, Mann, Proust, or Musil. Some questioned the uses of science and reason, and used their art to offer a mythology that might reorient and revitalize a materialist, hypocritical bourgeois society (e.g., Eliot's Wasteland, Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, Lawrence's "blood consciousness," and the attraction of artists like Picasso and Nolde to primitive carvings). Yet these artists (whose work was also initially shocking and puzzling) believed they were by their experiments and distortions and abstractions better expressing an underlying reality, however mysterious and complex.
Postmodernists, on the contrary, as David Harvey (1989, 44) points out, uncomplainingly embrace the ephemerality, fragmentation, discontinuity, and chaos of modern life without attempting to counteract or transcend it or trying to define any eternal elements within it. This is the significant difference that separates them from predecessors who may also have recognized imperfections in the status quo. The postmodernists' capitulation (expressed as relativism and defeatism), their "tolerance which finally amounts to indifference" (Harvey 1989, 62), their "contrived depthlessness [that] undermines all metaphysical solemnities" are what makes their work so displeasing and disturbing to a general public that has not as yet become so cynical and nihilistic. For many people continue to believe (or want to believe) that the arts still have a mission to inspire and elevate or that philosophy is still obliged to search for and discover verities by which to live.
Although the art lauded by postmodernist critics is puzzling, if not shocking and offensive, to many people, the social problems and cultural predicaments it reflects cannot be gainsaid. Exposure of the rigid, exclusive, and self-satisfied attitudes that often lie behind the rhetoric of modernism should, in large measure, be welcomed, for it is preparing the way for the liberation and democratization of art. But the postmodernist proclamation that there are a multiplicity of individual realities, all of which are open to an infinite number of interpretations and equally worthy of aesthetic presentation and regard, troubles me. I find this aspect of post-modernist aesthetics inadequate: have not the postmodernists abandoned the crumbling edifice of modernist authority for an equally uninhabitable esoteric antistructure of relativism, cynicism, and nihilism? If everything is equally valuable, is anything worth doing? Is sprawling promiscuity really an improvement on narrow elitism? Is absolute relativism a more credible position than absolute authority? From the postmodern viewpoint, the answers would be "Unfortunately, yes. That's the way it is, like it or not." But the Darwinian metanarrative discerns a few encouraging handholds that should provide escape from the abyss and restore access to a world of human meaning and human reality.
