Part I of “From Modern to Postmodern Art and Beyond” focused on Modernism’s brutalism, reductionism, and conceptualism — and philosophy’s contributions from Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud.
“By the beginning of the twentieth century, the nineteenth-century intellectual world’s sense of disquiet had become a full-blown anxiety. The artists responded, exploring in their works the implications of a world in which reason, dignity, optimism, and beauty seemed to have disappeared.“
Part II of the talk now focuses on the Postmodern art world’s themes of deconstruction, self-reference, hyphenated-identity artists, and nihilism.
“The art world reached out and drew upon the broader intellectual and cultural context of the late 1960s and 1970s. It absorbed the trendiness of Existentialism’s absurd universe, the failure of Positivism’s reductionism, and the collapse of socialism’s New Left. It connected to intellectual heavyweights such as Thomas Kuhn, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida …”
The talk was later developed and published in article form as “Why Art Became Ugly.”