{"id":434,"date":"2009-04-30T19:02:24","date_gmt":"2009-05-01T00:02:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/opensourcemusic.org\/?p=434"},"modified":"2009-04-30T19:17:20","modified_gmt":"2009-05-01T00:17:20","slug":"consumption-and-moving-beyond-post-modernism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/opensourcemusic.org\/?p=434","title":{"rendered":"Consumption and Moving Beyond Post-Modernism"},"content":{"rendered":"

I wrote<\/a> yesterday about how Lady GaGa’s persona is essentially an imitation, philosophically and stylistically of Andy Warhol, even though the artists expressed themselves through different medium.\u00a0 At the end I made a broad conclusion that, as a culture, we are failing to move beyond Post-Modernism.\u00a0 I thought that I should explain more about why this -considering what we are going through ontologically- feels different with the advent of the digital age.<\/p>\n

\"John

John Cage wrote very different music from Philip Glass, though both are post-modern composers<\/p><\/div>\n

What is Post-Modernism after all?\u00a0 I think it is important to define these parameters while we explore why we are just moving into a new period of the same thing.\u00a0 Wikipedia’s article<\/a> (quite like most tracts on Post-Modernism) struggles to define the period in clear cut terms.\u00a0 This is because this period featured an extreme breakdown of unified cultural movements.\u00a0 Instead of one broad cultural movement, with everyone expressing themselves in a similar manner (like Romanticism) we had a bunch of splintered movements, where groups of artists or even individuals created art of cultural significance entirely different from what another group may be doing.<\/p>\n

From the Wikipedia Page: “The Compact Oxford English Dictionary refers to postmodernism as ‘a style and concept in the arts characterized by distrust of theories and ideologies and by the drawing of attention to conventions.'”\u00a0 We can see in much of Andy Warhol’s work that his whole schtick with pop-art was drawing attention to conventions of our consumption.\u00a0 His famous Campbell Soup Can<\/a> piece highlights the forms of a simple every day object, our convention of eating canned soup.\u00a0 Likewise, when John Cage wrote 4:33<\/em>, he composed a work that, though he stated was intended to force people to listen to what was around them actually brought attention to the convention of a concert setting.\u00a0 Audience members attending the work for the first time probably thought, “I paid good money to hear music, why has the pianist not begun to play!”<\/p>\n

This definition works well, but it fails to tell us the definitive features that are common in all post-modern works.\u00a0 Maybe this is impossible, but I think that we can still find prevalent cultural trends even in a movement that “distrusts theories and ideologies.”\u00a0 The Standford Encylopedia of Philosophy<\/a> has a long article that delves deeply into what the editors believe are important philosophical tenants of post-modernism, but I thought I would refer to just one of the sections to keep this a blog post as opposed to a doctoral thesis on culture.<\/p>\n

In the article<\/a> Hyperreality is discussed:<\/p>\n

Hyperreality is closely related to the concept of the simulacrum: a copy or image without reference to an original. In postmodernism, hyperreality is the result of the technological mediation of experience, where what passes for reality is a network of images and signs without an external referent, such that what is represented is representation itself.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Now, it is important to stop before continuing and note that consumerism, especially in industrialized nations since World War II, has been one of the defining cultural movements in the post-modern period.\u00a0 The before the Internet <\/em>period (especially before our slick new social networking, web 2.0 apps) was defined by consumption of objects.\u00a0 The idea in America was that to obtain a white picket fenced house in the suburb, buy a car and TV was what every family needed to be happy.\u00a0 This hasn’t particularly been supplanted since the advent of the compu-global-hyper-mega-net, but in some ways, it is in the background as we are now consuming information from and about each other<\/p>\n

Consider the fact that in many industrialized nations over 10% of the population have a Facebook profile<\/a>.\u00a0 In Iceland 46.89%(!) of the population has a Facebook profile.\u00a0 Last January, 1 in 4 Americans had a Myspace account<\/a>.\u00a0 It is clear that webmasters have a huge amount to gain in profit from our consumption of each other.\u00a0 What happens in these short profiles about us, or in stream-of-consciousness-like “tweets” is we create of projection of ourselves based on what we would like other people to know, very much akin to a brief meeting and conversation with a stranger.<\/p>\n

This distillation of the self is essentially a Hyperreality of people.\u00a0 When I read a person’s profile, it does not permit me to know<\/em> them intimately as I would through working with, or befriending an individual.\u00a0 All I merely consume from that profile is the copy or image that the creator would like me to see, without reference to the true individual, their flaws, their dreams, their greatest accomplishments or their lowest low.\u00a0 Their being<\/em> is not their profile, which is merely a simplified reflection on an electronic surface.<\/p>\n

This is why our society has not moved beyond post-modernism and why, I believe we are ontologically stuck artistically with no direction.\u00a0 It would be wonderful for someone or something to come along and shake that up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I wrote yesterday about how Lady GaGa’s persona is essentially an imitation, philosophically and stylistically of Andy Warhol, even though the artists expressed themselves through different medium. At the end I made a broad conclusion that, as a culture, we are failing to move beyond Post-Modernism. I thought that I should explain more about why […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20001,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-434","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art-philosophy","odd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/opensourcemusic.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/434","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/opensourcemusic.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/opensourcemusic.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/opensourcemusic.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/20001"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/opensourcemusic.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=434"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/opensourcemusic.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/434\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":438,"href":"https:\/\/opensourcemusic.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/434\/revisions\/438"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/opensourcemusic.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=434"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/opensourcemusic.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=434"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/opensourcemusic.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=434"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}