The Post-Modernist Time Period.
The Post-Modernist Movement rejects the notion of advancement or progress. Post-Modernist Movements exist at the same time as
the Contemporary (artist)
which is the predominantly a term for everything created from the 1950s time period onward.
All art is not labelled as contemporary art. Some are P-M, and the broader term encompasses both artists who continue to work in modernist and late modernist traditions, as well as artists who reject it for other reasons.
Arthur Danto argues that "contemporary" is the broader term, and that P-M objects represent a "subsector" of the contemporary movement. Some P-M artists have made a more distinctive break from the ideas of modern art and there is no consensus as to what is "late-modern" and what is "P-M." Ideas rejected by the modern aesthetic have been reestablished.
In painting, P-M reintroduced representation. Traditional techniques and subject matter have returned in art. It has even been argued that much of what is called P-M today, the latest avant-gardism, should still be classified as modern art.
As well as describing certain tendencies of contemporary art,
Post-Modernism has also been used to denote a phase of modern
art. This position is adopted by both defenders of the Period
such as Clement Greenberg, as well as radical opponents of
this time such as Felix Guattari, who calls it the Period's
"last gasp.". The neo-conservative Hilton Kramer describes
P.M as "a creation of the Period at the end of its
tether." Jean-François Lyotard, in Frederic Jameson's analysis,
does not hold that there is a P.M stage radically
different from the period of high modernism; instead,
P.M discontent with this or that high modernist style
is part of the experimentation of high modernism,
giving birth to new Periods.
Many critics hold that postmodern art emerges out of modern art. Suggested dates for the shift from modern to postmodern include 1914 in Europe, and 1962 or 1968 in America. James Elkins, commenting on discussions about the exact date of the transition from modernism to P-M, compares it to the discussion in the 1960s about the exact span of Mannerism and whether it should begin directly after the High Renaissance or later in the century. He makes the point that these debates go on all the time with respect to art movements and periods, which is not to say that they aren't important. The close of the period of P-M art has been dated to the end of the 1980s, when the word P-M lost much of its critical resonance, and art practices began to address the impact of globalization and new media. Yet most artists and critics believe we are still in the P-M era and that this era is primarily defined by its "pluralism and diversity."
Fredrick Jameson argues that the condition of life and production will be reflected in all activity, including the making of art. Jean Baudrillard has had a significant influence on P-M-inspired art and has emphasised the possibilities of new forms of creativity. The artist Peter Halley describes his day-glo colours as "hyperrealization of real color", and acknowledges Baudrillard as an influence. Baudrillard himself, since 1984, was fairly consistent in his view that contemporary art, and P-M art in particular, was inferior to the modernist art of the post World War II period. 
Defining Post-Modern Art
P-M describes movements which both arise from,
and react against or reject, trends in modernism. Specific
trends of modernism that are generally cited are formal
purity, medium specificity, art for art's sake, authenticity,
universal truth, originality and the avant-garde. However,
paradox is probably the most important modernist idea against
which P-M reacts. Paradox was central to the
modernist enterprise, having been introduced by Manet.
Manet's various violations of representational art brought
to prominence the supposed mutual exclusiveness of reality
and representation, design and representation, abstraction
and reality, and so on. Never more than a technique, the
incorporation of paradox was nevertheless highly stimulating
from Manet all the way up to the conceptualists.
One characteristic of P-M art is its conflation of the distinction between high and low culture through the use of industrial materials and pop culture imagery. The use of low forms of art were a part of modernist experimentation as well, as documented in Kirk Vanedoe and Adam Gopnik's 1990-91 show High and Low: Popular Culture and Modern Art at New York's Museum of Modern Art, an exhibition that was universally panned at the time as the only event that could bring Douglas Crimp and Hilton Kramer together in a chorus of scorn. Fredrick Jameson suggests that Post-Modernist works abjure any claim to spontaneity and directness of expression, making use instead of pastiche and discontinuity. Against this definition Charles Harrison and Paul Wood maintain that pastiche and discontinuity are endemic to modernist art, and are deployed effectively by modern artists such as Manet and Picasso.
One compact definition is that P-M rejects modernism's grand narratives of artistic direction, eradicating the boundaries between high and low forms of art, and disrupting genre's conventions with collision, collage, and fragmentation. Post-Modernism art holds that all stances are unstable and insincere, and therefore irony, parody, and humor are the only positions that cannot be overturned by critique or revision. Avant-garde precursorsRadical movements and trends regarded as influential and potentially as precursors to Post-Modernism emerged around World War I and particularly in its aftermath. With the introduction of the use of industrial artifacts in art and techniques such as collage, avant-garde, pre Post-Modernist Movements such as Cubism , Dada and Surrealism questioned the nature and value of art. These movements were influenced by new artforms such as cinema and the rise of reproduction as a means of creating artworks. The ignition point for the definition of modernism, Clement Greenberg's essay, Avant-Garde and Kitsch, first published in Partisan Review in 1939, is a defence of the avant-garde in the face of popular culture. Later, Peter Bürger would make a distinction between the historical avant-garde and modernism, and critics such as Krauss, Huyssen, and Douglas Crimp, following Bürger, identified the historical avant-garde as a precursor to post-Modernism. Krauss, for example, describes Pablo Picasso's use of collage as an avant-garde practice that anticipates P-M art with its emphasis on language at the expense of autobiography. Another point of view is that avant-garde and modernist artists used similar strategies and that P-M repudiates both.
The Dada MovementFountain by Marcel Duchamp, 1917, photograph by Alfred Stieglitz.In the early 20th century Marcel Duchamp exhibited a urinal as a sculpture. His point was to have people look at the urinal as if it were a work of art, because he said it was a work of art. He referred to his work as "Readymades." The Fountain, was a urinal signed with the pseudonym R. Mutt, that shocked the art world in 1917. This and Duchamp's other works are generally labelled as Dada. Duchamp can be seen as a precursor to conceptual art. It is questionable, to some, whether Duchamp--whose obsession with paradox is well known--can be called Post-Modernist on only the grounds that he eschews any specific medium, since paradox is not medium-specific, although it arose first in Manet's paintings. Dadaism can be viewed as part of the modernist propensity to challenge established styles and forms, along with Surrealism , Futurism and Abstract Expressionism. From a chronological point of view Dada is located solidly within modernism, however a number of critics have held that it anticipates P-M while others, such as Ihab Hassan and Steven Connor, consider it a possible changeover point between modernism and P-M. For example, according to McEvilly, P-M begins with the realization that one no longer believes in the myth of progress, and that Duchamp sensed this in 1914 when he changed his modernist practice to a P-M one, "abjuring aesthetic delectation, transcendent ambition, and tour de force demonstrations of formal agility in favor of aesthetic indifference, acknowledgement of the ordinary world, and the found object or readymade." Movement List and ArtistsMovements: Pop Art - line break, Minimalism, conceptual art, The usage of: assemblage, montage, bricolage, and appropriation. Abstract Expressionism, Color field, Hard-edge, Lyrical Abstraction. Artists: Jackson Pollock Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, Philip Guston, Hans Hofmann, Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt
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