Art or Idiocy?

So What are We In?
...declaring the death of postmodernism???

BY ERIK WENZEL

That’s what a woman asked me at the opening for a show I was in last weekend. So, what are we in?

We’re definitely not in postmodernism. We’re not even in post-postmodernism. When college professors have you deconstruct things the way you would diagram sentences back in grade school, you know it’s over. Postmodernism is technically a term for architecture and nothing else. When Philip Johnson put a “chippendale” at the top of his skyscraper for AT&T it was postmodern. Everyone else just took that Baudrilliard and Derrida (who intended deconstruction as a way to examine and improve systems, not tear them apart as proof of rhetorical mettle) and ran with it.

Postmodernism came about to kill painting, the father, and the oppressor, which was all the same white guy, the Übermensch. It has taught us that art is useless. Art can’t heal, it doesn’t stop war, it isn’t magical or mysterious and it is certainly not special or sublime. It just sits there and looks like whatever you want it to. We don’t have time for that anymore, though. We just want to go play video games and listen to music. No one wants art that reminds them of how bad things are. We want to have fun and start enjoying art again, instead of having it be a never-ending torturous trip through the evils mankind has wrought upon the Earth. That’s why everyone is making rock art and DJ art. Maybe it’s shallow and incredibly ignorant, but at least it’s not such a downer. The more serious the world gets, the more art is going to become an escape from it, a refuge. That’s why Monet is so popular; he doesn’t remind us of how bad things are. If we wanted to know how bad things are, we’d turn on the news.

And painting is back too. Digital art, like the dotcom and telephones, was a huge novelty at first, but it turned out that people still like to write letters and go to stores and to paint. The easiness of digital tools has produced a new kind of kitsch, the Sunday video artist, and the Sunday photographer. People will always paint, because it’s fun and rewarding, and it IS nice to hang on the wall. Painting never dies; it just goes out of fashion. Just because gigantic digital photographs by guys named Thomas are the IN thing, it doesn’t mean that production of canvas and paint will halt. Artists, at least the ones that are good, are using whatever means they have available to express themselves, be it painting, sculpture, or video. Artists have come up in the postmodern climate, but are beginning to shed that thought process. The pluralistic mindset of postmodernism has become as much of a mind trap as the Modernist paradigm it shifted.

I told the woman I thought the next new thing was fun art, that all the bitterness of postmodernism was kind of giving way to a more lighthearted and free art. By God, I hope I’m right.