I'm totally serious. It just seems to me that the rise of that unfortunate blight on the collective intellect, postmodernism, has coincided with a parallel rise of "anything goes" in the world of art as well. A sort of "Hellenization" of attitudes toward what is or isn't art, if you will.
eh-hum. Well, Blixa answered this already but I'll add my 2 cents since I don't think Shades is going to see what she means. A long time ago, I tried to find some kind of continuity between philosophical periods, science/technology, art, music, and so on, and the terminology does not translate smoothly at all, even just isolating periods in philosophy is debatable. Abstract art is usually associated with the term "modern art". Atonal music is usually referred to as 20th century music. "Postmodernism" in philosophy which is usually taken to refer to the "postmodern theorists" I think maps around late sixties or seventies, and eighties, long after abstract art and atonal music had been around.
So the gut intuition that "postmodernism" = naïve relativism = a bunch of junk on canvas or music that doesn't sound like music is problematic. Andy Wharhol I think is a popular example of postmodern art. Like all things "postmodern", there is suppose to be some kind of backlash to modernism, and specifically, in postmodern art, there is supposed to be a rebellion against modern art and its abstraction.
Intellectually, why might it be modern art that is "abstract" and why would postmodern art have a problem with that? Don't people like Juliann who claim to be postmodernists dislike the idea of "Truth", and wouldn't a great way to express that disdain be to throw a bucket of paint into a jet engine which slaps it anywhere on a canvas?
I just erased a bunch of philosophy talk because I forgot Shades hates philosophy. An example Shades might be more familiar with though I admit this is highly controversial, I will ask him to consider 20th century physics. Einstein thought through his problems of relativity in first person, and his results were counter-intuitive. Yet, he successfully defined time as a local phenomena where time and space are in some way subject to the observer. 20th century physics continued with ideas that are both counter-intuitive, and somehow tied to subjective observation (collapse of the wave function). This doesn't imply relativism, but it does imply a growing popularity and comfort with abstract thinking and representation as a product of the subject, discarding theological or classical notions like absolute time, space, and so on. And the way I see it, modern art and atonal music are/were similarly devoted to representational "truth" by the way of highly subjective and abstract considerations that weren't "relative" but rather, highly principled, structured, yet difficult to understand and not easily appreciated by fools (like me). So, extremely realistic classical painting might line up to some degree with how science was perceived in Newtons day, and there might be an analogy between the abstraction and subjectivity found in early 20th century modern art and the emerging science which was becoming highly theoretical. Modern artists and atonal musicians usually happen to also be virtuoso. The performers at the atonal music concert I went to at BYU were downright amazing.
I'm skipping over the problems of solipsism and questions of knowledge and truth for now to keep this non-philosophical for Shades, and also to show how modernism/postmodernsim contrast without broaching the question that usually superficially frames the discussion by, "do you believe in truth or not?" So where does postmodernism fit in? Again, to over-simplify:
God-Newton-Divine Metaphysical Objectivity-Classical realism
Existentialism Positivism Subjectivity Einstein abstraction Modern art
postmodernism community folk art
A "postmodern" objection to European white male scientists and composers might observe something Shades is familiar with, translating Japanese into English. If not all Japanese concepts translate into English, how can you ultimately decide on what true and overarching concepts exist? One common gripe postmodernists have with modernism is the power it puts in the hands of the individual, and it puts emphasis on the individual's context with community. That, and the observation that communities might not translate well into each other (like languages).
ooops..got to go