My little sister, who just finished her undergrad in English at OU, has been trying to explain "post-modernism" to her theater major roommate. I think of the maxim, "Never argue with a stupid person: they'll just drag you down to their level and beat you with experience," but, at my mother's request, I left a longish answering machine message trying to explain postmodernism in a nutshell. Anyway, my sister had some more questions, and I came up with a lenghty short answer, which I decided to post below.
I first "got" postmodernism in a freshman art history class at UT 20+ years ago. The way it was explained to me, modernists rejected traditional forms and styles and attempted to create new ones based on abstraction and the inherent qualities of the media in which they worked. Postmodernists rejected the rejection, re-embracing tradition in a playful, eclectic and self-consciously ironic way.
The example that sticks in my mind was architectural. After showing us buildings with classical columns and modernist buildings which emphatically lacked them, he showed us a slide of an influential public square built in New Orleans in the 1970's. Among other features it included doric columns -- but instead of being structural they were made of made of falling water, a grand thumbing of the nose at the "form follows function" school of modernism.
For my middlebrow purposes that example works pretty well. I can see its analogies in art forms which are closer to me, like literature and music.
Some years later I got to see the square (whose name escapes both me and Google) and it revealed another feature of postmodernism: its tendency to be ephemeral. The square was crumbling, its snappy colors were fading, and the water was turned off. No one who hadn't seen the lecture would ever get the joke.
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