A post-modernist post-mortem

Sooner or later it had to happen. Post-modernist art is dead. Long live post-post modernism! Do I have a handle on the new flavor? I do not. I’m still catching up with the post-mods. Let’s start with my dim understanding of that …

Post-modernist art was all about self-conscious, thumb-in-your-eye artifice. Illusion of life? F*ck that shit. “Look, Ma! This is a painting! It ain’t real!” Post-mod novels, plays, and performance art were equally unreal. (Post-mod architecture was just really ugly.) 

 

Post-mod artists suspended the suspension of disbelief from the gallows, and replaced the author’s “voice” with a mechanical larynx box. But the voice was never there to begin with! Like God and Santa, the “author” doesn’t exist, so how could they have a voice? The “author” is a fiction! (Especially fiction authors!) Their “voice” is a clever ventriloquist’s trick. What you’re really hearing is the System talking. It’s the voice of capitalist mind control bending you to its all-consuming will! Oh you think that’s a painting of a pretty flower? Put on these post-mod sunglasses, pal.

 

CONSUME! OBEY! REPRODUCE!

 

Yeah. Now you get the picture.

 

A little post-mod trick called “deconstruction” exposed the hidden manipulation lurking behind the sappy bourgeoisie commodity of art and literature. “That story you just read. It would’ve been really sad if it actually happened, huh?” Shit like that. This gimmick was invented by cranky French art critics who pissed in every punchbowl they could find. Artists of all descriptions drank the Kool-Aid.

 

Novelists realized they had nothing to say. And said it in 900 pages.

 

Visual artists with nothing to paint, sculpt or draw captured the screaming emptiness across a range of mediums.

 

Hey, the post-mods weren’t all bad. (Thomas Pynchon and William Gibson flipped the one-sided Mobius strip of media and power. They took you into a funhouse mirror maze. But they still had stories to tell.)

 

Ah, but the bulk of post-mod art was sterile and boring. It was a one-trick pony. A dead end. A series of jokes with the same stale punchline that was old in Shakespeare’s time. “This play isn’t real.” How clever. What a clever artist you are.

 

That illusion-killing cleverness was the point—and the post-mod artist’s payoff. You chumps are trapped in a false narrative? The clever arteest will spoil the show and ruin the ride. That sounds mean, but it’s a victimless crime, people. It’s like attacking the audioanimatronic bears at Walt Disney World’s Country Bear Jamboree with a sledgehammer. The artist smashes them to bolts and bits. So what? They don’t feel anything. These “bears” are just stupid machines. They’re not even alive—so can tell your kid to stop crying, OK? And stop looking at me like that! F*ck you—you assholes should thank me! I just set you free from this corporate bullshit. Now go home and do your taxes.

 

This post-mod, bait-and-switch buzzkill got very old, very quickly—about the time it popped out of the womb, in fact. Like any intellectual fad, it wasn’t defeated by an opposing philosophy. The post-mod artists and critics just got old and started to die.

 

Now what?

 

Sigh.

Now ...

 

Like some shiny, polite beast, post-post modernist art struts to Bethlehem to be born. And there’s music, too! God … where's that repetitive beat coming from? Augggh … it’s a retro drum machine. And now the beast is singing. That warbling voice … Oh Christ. It’s autotuned!