From: Shannon Stoney (shannonstoney@earthlink.net)
Date: 08/18/02-07:03:59 PM Z
Judy wrote:
Pubic hair is a matter of
> fashion, like leg shaving --
What is the pubic hair fashion in NYC at the moment?
>
> However, if you checked the word in a massive data base, I think you'd
> find that post-modernism, so called, is like Lil Abner's famous schmoo,
> meaning whatever the folks using the term want or need at the moment, ping
> ponging between whipping person & liberation. On the one hand it's
> conceptual, flatfooted and a bore, Richard Prince type art, but it's just
> as likely and as often applied to "alt-photo" -- the hand work, "fancy
> borders," manipulations, toning, solarization, camera tricks and other
> devices of "crooked photography" so utterly forbidden by mid-century
> "modernists," or purists.
Hey, I thought we were the Antiquarian Avant-Garde, a different camp.
I checked the word post modernism in the massive data base that is the
internet, and found one thing that everybody seemed to agree on: that it is
in large part a reaction to the excesses of modernism, mainly modernism as
propounded by Clement Greenberg, whom everybody loves to hate. But really, I
still haven't figured out what it is, and as you imply, nobody seems to be
able to tell me, even the people who want me to be it.
So, what does Postmodernism mean to you? That sounds like some version of a
question in the Miss America contest, or an essay topic for high school
students ("What Freedom Means to Me"), but go for it, Judy.
Maybe some day I'll read this massive tome I have called Art in Theory,
1900-1990, and figure out how it came to be that there could be a theory of
art, literature, life, the universe, and everything that nobody understands
but that 90% of the people in the humanities sort of ascribe to without
having actually read any of the basic texts of it. And that people in the
sciences totally ignore.
--shannon
>
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