Is Postmodern Art On the Decline?

 

David Bowie (Modernist) Paintings

 

I see it both flourishing and declining, which might mean that we view it as a both-and situation where artists have a wider range of philosophical positions. In music, I tend to alternate between pre-modern (classical, folk, ethnic) and postmodern (pop, electronic, ambient, experimental) and see them as being equally viable creatively. In visual art, I am completely postmodern, and as far as I’m concerned, isn’t declining because it is such fertile ground for conceptual work. Since I don’t make representational art, I can’t be pre-modern, which has to do with whether you have the manual skills. There seems to be more and more interest in re-modernism which will succeed postmodernism and will be more free and eclectic. It won’t be that artists will feel they need to have an allegiance to postmodernism, which is just as limiting as modernism or pre-modernism.

5/30/2023

[5/30/2024: AI art seems to continue to follow this evolution, with the content being more representational or modernist, compared to the late 90s, when postmodernism was hot in popular culture. It still is, but content creators tend to want to follow current trends of creating work that is less unnerving, as compared to the 90s when people seemed to want anxiety-provoking content. I recall David Bowie saying in an interview in 1999 that he felt an urgency to create postmodern work because that era was perhaps ending. It's interesting that Bowie's artwork was mostly representational (modernist) when almost all the music was postmodernist. He did things that were blues-based, which was modernist.]