19: The Postmodern World

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Introduction

With the many manifestos written in the early 1900s and the technological innovations arriving after WW II, the modern age was embraced allowing for more leisure time, and would ultimately be a time of progress, peace, prosperity, and happiness. The realities of the Modern Movement did not fulfill those high expectations, and art soon moved to counter and criticize the modern with the emergence of Pop Art and overall cynicism. Postmodern art allows the space for critical reflections on modern life as well as creating art from multiple periods. Postmodern artists can pull from the classical past, the Renaissance, world art, and the modern world to create art in a wide range of media. The visual art produced in this period still functions just as art has functioned for thousands of years - it moves us, its uses are many and varied including propaganda, visual delight, to protest, to inform, to educate, and for the fun of it.