Modernism Postmodernism free essay sample

Examined in terms of origins, ideologies, relation to other schools, commodification, aesthetics and representationalism vs. abstraction. The post in postmodernism implies less a chronological succession than an opposition, and an intimate connection. The term postmodernism is sometimes accused of being the inflated focus for such a range of contradictory investments that sorting out its precise relationship to what went before is difficult. But, though postmodernism can be defined as having a number of sources, such as the recrudescence of the cultural avant garde, the penetration of cultural life by the commodity form, [or] the exhaustion of certain classical bourgeois ideologies, its primary source, and its principle subject for critique, is modernism. In the various ways in which modernity serves as its focus, postmodernism justifies its title. In most definitions of postmodernism, the failings of modernity are clearly the basis from which the later movement derives its impetus. Whether it is