Postmodernist Culture

"...contemporary life as a 'society of the spectacle'... commodity was the image rather than the concrete material product."

"...the explosion and acceleration of cultural commodities, or, more generally of social images or 'signs' functioning as commodities, produces a 'political economy of the sign'."

"...is the reflection of a basic reality."

"...'an escalation of the true, of the lived experience' in other words, the cult of immediate experience, of raw, intense reality."

"...artistic modernism is defined at some point between practice and theory, between artistic objects and their definitions. The postmodern debate makes this interrelationship even more complex."

"...the modernist revolution in the arts is to be understood primarily... as nothing less than art's discovery of itself, as form, subject, and practice."

"...what quality is shared by all objects that provoke our aesthetic emotions?... significant form... lines and colours combined in a particular way, certain forms and relation of forms, stir our aesthetic emotions. To appreciate a work of art we need bring with us nothing from life."

"...the multiplication of stylistic norms and the return of symbolism. Whereas modernism emphasised the integrity of style of the artist, postmodernism breaks down this norm by encouraging multiplicity of style and method."

"...involves the hesitantly ironic adaptation of other modes, historical an contemporary."

"If the subject of Modern art, according to one oversimplification of Clement Greenberg, is the perfection of its medium, then the subject of Post-Modern art is about [sic] past art which acknowledges its artificiality." 

"...the mixing of incompatible styles"

"...postmodernist art is characterised by 'the willingness of artists and audiences to embrace subjects of mutual and perennial interest, to acknowledge all the uses of art'..."

"At root, Post-Modern art is neither exclusionary nor reductive but synthetic, freely enlisting the full range of conditions, experiences, and knowledge beyond the object...allowing a myriad of access points, an infinitude of interpretive responses."

"...unabashed return to representation, symbolism, connotation, and all the other forms of referentiality."

"Jencks believes that art can now acknowledge itself as it always was, thoroughly bourgeois, and return itself to the forms and subjects tabooed by modernism. Jencks finds nothing distasteful in this new realism.., he believes we must adopt an attitude of amused, agnostic pragmatism."

Bourgeois - materialistic values and conventional attitudes.

"...institutions and canonical traditions which is to be challenged in postmodern art and postmodern theory."

"...postmodernist art aims to undermine the modernist imperatives of the formal and stylistic integrity of the individual work..."

"...promote the exploration of the multiple relationships between art and its contexts."

"...image and text are to be understood as an enactment of a 'postmodern sublime'..."