THE DEFINITION OF POSTMODERNISM The End of History “Postmodernism” was a term coined in 1939 by Arnold Toynbee early in the twentieth century to refer to the last quarter of the 19th century, a time where capitalism and imperialism and Western...
HOW THE AVANT-GARDE DIED When the theorists of the avant-garde wrote of the avant-garde movements and works of art, whether Renato Poggioli in 1968 or Renato Poggioliin 1984, it was from a historical perspective, in the past tense. The question is what killed the...
HOW OBJECTS BECOME “ART” In writing The Artworld, art writer and philosopher, Arthur Danto, laid out a history of how art history had to change its theories of what art was supposed to be in the face of new objects. He said, “Suppose one thinks of...
ART AND FEMINISM According to Lee Krasner, the art world in New York in the late 1930s was an egalitarian place. Discrimination arrived in the persons of the French Surrealists, renowned misogynists, who considered women to be children or muses. In the 1940s, the few...
THE IMPACT OF FEMINIST ART To examine the impact of feminist art upon mainstream art is to examine the long list of what was excluded or forbidden in the art world. For those outside this world, artists appear to be daring avant-garde experimenters, but nothing could...
THE PHILOSOPHY OF CONCEPTUAL ART PART TWO “Art is art. Everything else is everything else.” Ad Reinhardt The artist, Joseph Kosuth, insisted that Conceptual Art was a child of the 1960s, not the Civil Rights sixties, not the Stonewall sixties, not the...
