LATE 20^th CENTURY STYLES

-A New World Political and economic Order;

-USA and USSR

-Frequent interventions of both parties whenever they perceived their interests at stake

-Counterculture seeks to dismantle authority and power structures

-Civil Rights, Women’s liberation, ethnic awareness, homosexual movements

Michel Foucault: (recall his remarks on Velazquez) examines: 1) importance of perspective, 2) the nature of power structures

-contends that even our concepts of mental illness reveal inherent power structures

Ruth Benedict: bad = abnormal

Michel Foucault: ill = abnormal

-Do we choose health?: Viagra, Rogaine, Diet Pills, etc.

-We seem to make choices (moral choices?) to fit in with socially accepted trends

-The postmodern lesson: we have to realize that we are influenced by context

Postmodernism: new emphasis on contexts (e.g., Mark Tansey A Short History of Modernist Painting 1982)

The New Realism

-There is a world worth portraying "out there", but the postmodern painter reserves the right to use modernist tools available to her

Philip Pearlstein

-"Rescues" the human figure from the abstractionists and the pornographers

Richard Estes

-photomontage

-like a photograph, yet details are inserted, removed, brought out: "It’s a selection of various aspects of reality"

Gregory Gillespie’s Self-Portrait

-joins tradition of Durer, Rembrandt as one of realist introspection

Duane Hanson: Supermarket Shopper sculpture

-subject is spiritually bankrupt, middle class housewife who can afford the trappings of consumerism

-lifts the ordinary to symbolic status (whereas in the Bourgeois Baroque in the Netherlands the ordinary tended to be lifted to the religiously significant)

-Understanding contexts and perspective:

Umberto Eco

Carlo Maria Mariani It is Forbidden to Awaken the Gods

Julian Schnabel

Anselm Kiefer

Romare Bearden

Carrie Mae Weems Mirror, Mirror

Jacques Derrida

-Thinking about the universe as it is in flux

Wal-Mart: "Bring it home to the USA"

Science used to be seen as a way to divert environmental catastrophes, now it is under the postmodern microscope as the cause of them:

-pollution

-genetic engineering (e.g., Jeremy Rifkin The Biotech Century)

-abortion

-aiding in the wealth gap between individuals and countries

• Arts from all epochs may be enjoyed and drawn upon at this moment.