Modernism, Postmodernism, Meta-modernism

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huckelberry
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Re: Modernism, Postmodernism, Meta-modernism

Post by huckelberry »

Hononentheos, your expansion upon the open post was interesting, worth thinking about.

I am not familiar with Everything Everywhere All at Once but found this discussion of it by the same fellow presenting in your first post.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvclV0_o0JE

He focuses on the confusion people are presented with by the accessibility of bits of experience and information from everywhere and everybody. I found myself thinking of a fairly simple observation. Information in pieces is just confusion. Understanding is how things fit together, how things actually work. Yesterday I viewed a couple of discussions about young earth creationism. Young earth creation proponents seems to take bits and pieces of information they see as presenting problems for the science. There is a phrase, Gish gallop for the procedure, present lots of pieces of information without digestion. Stones and fossils tell a clear story of an earth which is very old and has been going through many changes over millions of years. Of course if you pick up a couple of rocks you cannot discover anything about that from them. It is how the rocks fit with other rocks , how those patterns fits with larger patterns that provides information. I see a summary point, understanding of what is real lies within the story not the fragments.

The observation I understand from postmodernism is that stories not only reveal things they hide things. Often what is hidden is oppressive dimensions which are hidden because those benefiting rather keep the harm in the shadows. I think this clearly is a valuable realization. Dismantling a story to see what it hides is a worth while project. It does not eliminate the value of stories, it is a story itself. Building the value of stories and deconstructing stories are in a mutual dance. There is at least the possibility that the dance is mutually beneficial.

////thinking again on popular music,
It occurred to me that "Highway 61" could be seen as postmodern. Compare to "When the Ship Comes in" makes that earlier song pretty well fit the category, modern. Then "All along the Watchtower" could be called metamodern. Well I am not really all that happy with the terminology but it says something.

I think there is naturally an ongoing mixing back and forth of art ,expression,understanding of efforts fitting each of these catagories. Probably some times fit or use one category more than the others. I suspect all three are always working together with perhaps one being more visible in a given instance.
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Re: Modernism, Postmodernism, Meta-modernism

Post by huckelberry »

I will open a door on my complaints.

what is post modern art? google provides this blurb:
"What Is Postmodern Art? Postmodern art rejected the traditional values of modernism, and instead embraced experimentation with new media and art forms including intermedia, installation art, conceptual art, multimedia, performance art, and identity politics.Sep 23, 2021"

I think it may be possible to accept this if you are willing to propose that Modern art means 18 19th century academic work, David, Ingres or English Reynolds or Gainsburogh. Such all embracing narratives pretty much started to be challanged mid 18th century. Salute Courbet. Reach the first decade of the 20th century with Damoiselles D'Avignon and you are way into the heart of this postmodernism. The past 50 years has been too much of a fading rehash.( not fair to everybody)

Actually I think the postmodernist idea that thinking prior to this focused upon maintaining one overarching narrative is silly and absurd. I think people have always seen multiple narratives. conflicting or contradicting views intertextual influence but for the past couple of hundred years these have been given more center stage views.

My first encounter with the phrase Postmodernism, was late 60s modern was still a positive and something to be assumed to mean now. There was a lot of challenges to some traditional views or assumptions in society but nobody called that postmodernism. Modernism in art was thought to mean the revolutions or inventions starting back with Courbet Manet Monet etc. Influential critics found it useful to see a march of progress in art toward some culmination. It came about 1968 when artists and critics looked around and started saying it is complete no new revolution no new art, modern art is dead. Of course nobody was happy with the idea of art being dead so they started calling it postmodern as modern was dead.

In ways this is self contradictory use of modern but fits in some ways. Art from 1860 to 1969 was seen as an overarching story of discovery. People competed for who was telling the true version of this story. The assumption that there was such a story was projected despite the obvious fact that there were different movement different people doing different things. A story of art told by Matisse is not the same story as told by Jackson Pollock. The story as told by Jackson Pollock is not the same as Clement Greenburgs story of Jackson Pollock.

well an advantage of postmodern for art is the war over the true version of modern art is gone. There is openness to wider range of things as a result. Jeff Koons can make a fortune even though I can find no way to stomach his work. Other people are free to feel differently.
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Re: Modernism, Postmodernism, Meta-modernism

Post by huckelberry »

honorentheos wrote:
Wed May 31, 2023 5:39 am
I once heard the best definition of pop media on NPR, which was, "Pop is anything that does the work for you." It's such a subjective (postmodern?) take on what constitutes pop culture and pop media yet seems to capture exactly what makes "pop" pop. The converse being media that demands a cost to appreciate it fully, usually through both study and attempts at practice. Jazz has both a low and high bar for appreciation. Low in that it can be pleasantly "pop" in its own right. High, in that the best jazz musicians can only be appreciated by being familiar with the structure of the music. Coltrane is appreciable at almost any level, but to see his genius requires more than tuning in. .....

But there's a broader point here. I think our society is at a point where we've deconstructed ourselves into societal failure. While I didn't agree with MG's points, I actually agreed with MG's concerns in the broad strokes in his thread where he mistakenly blamed Gen Z for being irreligious and ruining society as a result. And like the essay points out, those who would push a return to High Noon or, more likely, Top Gun Maverik, aren't responding to the state of the world as it is but as they fantasize how it OUGHT to be. MG would have the world return to making High Noon.

Now, folks like Culty and many others who post as contrarians are far along the deconstruction of postmodernism to the point they don't care about anything beyond their myopic ego-centric emotions. s meaning and purpose in just opposing their nihilism through critic or absurdity. Why not? Nothing matters......

So that gets to the point about hypermodernism and metamodernism. If postmodernism asserts the end of ideologies because any one person's ideology will disadvantage someone else, and hypermodernism is the overwhelming cacophony of ideological views being pushed through all the forms of media that demand a person code shift constantly to simple tread water in the sea of multiplicity of competing realities, how does one find meaning? I think most anyone who has left religion gets accused of descending into meaningless existence. And the response back that there is meaning in one's life and relationships gets met with a stiff-armed defense in favor of the interloper's ideology of choice. I think there's something to this idea that as we, as a society, struggle with not rejecting the varied experiences and realities of others, as individuals we do need to make meaning that works for us. And there is the metamodern.
Honorentheos, I find some things you bring up cause me to reflect, not disagree. I am selecting a few of your comments here just to think about them.

Yes I feel quite familiar with the idea of leaving religion as possible descent into meaninglessness. I left belief in 1967 just shy of 18 years old. That was time and place when the possibility of meaninglessness seems a pressing possibility. I do remember a person who felt strongly that the Mormon church drained all meaning out of life so quit all participation. There were possibilities of meaning all about however, some better than others.

"How does it feel ,, to be on your own, like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone..."

Honorentheos, you may be pointing out that a tumbling jumble of possible meanings has a lot in common with no meaning. Yet there is no escape from multiple meanings that sometimes conflict with each other.
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Re: Modernism, Postmodernism, Meta-modernism

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This is part from an article on Coltrane sparked by Honorentheos comments about Coltrane. I am thinking that the perception of meaning in the blur of fragmented experience has some similarity to experiencing giant steps as music instead of noise.
The article starts with the technical specifics for the song(keys, cords and a bit of observation why giant steps does not stick with one key and some of that keys cords)
https://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2018/giant-steps/
////

"At the time of its recording, “Giant Steps” represented the furthest extreme of intellectual and technical ambition in jazz. Now, however, being able to play it is a basic entry requirement for the art form. You won’t be taken seriously as a jazz musician unless you can play “Giant Steps” at speed, and you won’t get the full respect of the other jazz bros unless you can play it in all twelve keys. It’s not enough to “conquer” the tune; the jazz bros have to keep one-upping each other with ever-more-Baroque variations on it.

It would be fine if all this obsessive technical study was leading to better and more creative music, but that is not what’s happening. Instead, the jazz bros treat “Giant Steps” as a kind of musical video game, and compete to beat each others’ high scores. This is boring even for a devoted Coltrane fan like me, and I can only imagine how much it repels casual onlookers.

Jazz bro culture is not Coltrane’s fault. Within a few years of writing “Giant Steps,” he came to realize that it was a dead end, and he went in the opposite direction, playing music with few or no chord changes and open-ended forms. He still implied complex key changes in his own solos, but they happened against a static harmonic background. More importantly, Coltrane never lost sight of the main point of music, which is to communicate emotionally. All of his intellectual abstractions were in the service of melody and feeling. “Giant Steps” itself is a case in point. It’s not just a mathematical puzzle; it’s also one of the loveliest and most memorable melodies in jazz history. After hearing it once, my five-year-old son was walking around humming it. I can explain analytically why the melody works so well, and maybe I’ll do that in a future post. But you don’t need any technical music knowledge to hear how and why it works, because it explains itself with perfect clarity.

Contemporary jazz bros revere Coltrane, but they haven’t abided by his commitment to strong and soulful melodies. It’s rare for a contemporary jazz musician to write a tune you’d want to hear twice. This is due in part to the structure of the music academy. You can systematize the study of harmony, you can write journal articles and books about it, and you can teach it in classes. But you can’t teach the writing of emotionally resonant tunes, because no one knows why we like the tunes we like, and no one has developed a formal approach to writing good ones. These institutional issues aside, though, academic jazz musicians aren’t even trying to figure out how to write catchy tunes. Quite the opposite; they usually look on pop music with disdain. This is not at all in keeping with Coltrane’s own musical values. He knew pop songs were worthy of attention, and they form the basis for many of his best recordings.

The same year he released the Giant Steps LP, Coltrane also released My Favorite Things, which is all reworkings of the most clichéd, middle-of-the-road pop standards of its era.

Coltrane’s takes on pop songs are as significant as his originals. It’s impressive to be able to write challenging and abstract art, but it’s even more impressive to be able to use banal pop songs as raw material for art. Few present-day jazz musicians are making the same effort to signify on present-day pop, and their neglect of the commercial mainstream has desperately impoverished their music."
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Re: Modernism, Postmodernism, Meta-modernism

Post by honorentheos »

Huck, correct my if I'm wrong but I read your comments as saying you take issue with the categorization of art into modern or postmodern buckets?
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Re: Modernism, Postmodernism, Meta-modernism

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Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. The more things change, the more it's just the same thing. Or at least, the more things change, the more I want to say, Plus ça change ....

Forms and conventions keep changing, because we get bored with familiar things. We need some amount of familiarity, though, because art is illusion. It takes bazillions of atoms to make real chair, but in a book all it takes is five letters. A ton of hard drives can't hold enough information to define a real-world event, but prose conveys it in a handful of bytes—and even film doesn't take so much more.

Art is incredibly thin and incredibly fake, a ridiculous trick that only works because of the enormous amount of background information that is in the expectations of the audience. Tropes and conventions are part of that. Without them, a few pages of prose are just meaningless. If you don't hit enough notes of familiar situation within the first paragraph, nobody has a clue about what is going on, so no-one cares—and no-one reads further. It's surprising how much hand-holding familiarity is needed to make a readable story. Books that give a strong impression of bewildering firehose-streaming novelty seem pedantic on later re-reading, because it really doesn't take much novelty to make the whole thing seem strange.

From year to year, people put out new stories within the established forms. From decade to decade, the forms themselves change. Conventions that used to be firm are retired; they're too familiar and boring. New conventions always appear in their places, because the enormous data compression of art needs the infrastructure. Old books and films often seem plodding; today we cut to the chase. But just see how hard it is to cut to anything but the chase. After a cut, people are expecting a chase. If what they get is not that, you'll just lose them.
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huckelberry
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Re: Modernism, Postmodernism, Meta-modernism

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honorentheos wrote:
Sat Jun 03, 2023 2:12 pm
Huck, correct my if I'm wrong but I read your comments as saying you take issue with the categorization of art into modern or postmodern buckets?
honorentheos, perhaps I am meandering. I found myself reviewing with mixed thoughts. I can see postmodern as a style bucket much more clearly than modernism. I am inclined to think characterizations of modern are grossly restricted to further ideological ends.(or perhaps competitive ends)

Is Moby Dick postmodern or modern, or by being saved by the coffin coming to the surface after the shipwreck metamodern?

I think you are concerned about a social difficulty present and perhaps related to too much postmodernism. I think it best to not replace modernism with its wide variety of thought, styles and understandings with postmodernism.Better to let postmodern works join in the modern conversation.

/////
adding,
I just looked up Moby Dick with google and was supplied with an article specifying what things in the book like the whale symbolized. Oh my horrors! I did not read it in that way at all.When reading the book I was stuck with a much more post modern reading. I guess I have been warped by post modern expectations.
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Re: Modernism, Postmodernism, Meta-modernism

Post by huckelberry »

On second reading of Physics Guys post I can only respect the pointed observations. To say:"Art is incredibly thin and incredibly fake, a ridiculous trick that only works because of the enormous amount of background information that is in the expectations of the audience."may sound snarky at first but is instead valuable because of its accuracy and clarity about how the story telling works.
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Re: Modernism, Postmodernism, Meta-modernism

Post by honorentheos »

Years ago I picked up a book by the neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran authored in 2003 I believe. In it he speculated about what may be hardwired in us that evokes aesthetic appreciation versus what is culturally accrued, and promised he found the topic of highest interest. Mentions of a book on the topic were given. I've waited a long time for that book. I believe the closest we got was a chapter in a book in 2012. This ten year old blog post about a chapter in a book expanding on his thoughts from that other twenty year old book may be of interest:

http://myfrencheasel.blogspot.com/2013/ ... s.html?m=1
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Re: Modernism, Postmodernism, Meta-modernism

Post by huckelberry »

honorentheos, I checked out your linked article with some interest. I think what is in view there is primarily how human perception works and what the background for that is. I do not think that is exactly the same as the matter of what is beautiful or effective art. It is of course a necessary premise or beginning for what is an effective work of art.
6. Abhorrence of coincidences

This one is interesting. An illustration of this is that we don’t like a painting when a tree is exactly in the middle. What are the chances of that happening?

7. Orderliness

Here, Ramachandran put together under this heading our abhorrence for deviation from expectations. For the artist it is a matter of balance between too much order (boring) and total chaos (not pleasing).
Considering number six, people find a human face in the middle of a picture quite a bit more acceptable than this suggested tree. There was a comment from somebody pointing out that a coincidence becomes a distraction and as such an annoyance. This clearly assumes there should be something of importance that the art work is opening our attention to.

I do not think we abhor deviation from expectations but relationship to expectations is necessary for perception. Physics Guys comments certainly apply here.

So what is beauty ? I am not sure If I have figured that one out. Then there is the consideration that not all art which people have valued is beautiful.
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