I don't believe in postmodernism.

I don't believe in postmodernism.  

When I say that, I'm not saying that all of the art that is considered postmodern art is bad.  Some of it is quite good!  I just don't believe that it's postmodern.  I don't believe that postmodernism happened.  I think it's all hype and, essentially, a sales tactic, to call certain art "postmodern".  I'm skeptical.

I mean, words are our servants, not our masters.  If you want to call this art "postmodern," you can.  No one is stopping you.  You can call it "bananafish" if you want.  And if it has become customary to speak of a "postmodern era" in art and culture, so be it.  I can abide by that convention.  And if so, I would say that little flickers of the postmodern age were starting in roughly somewhere around 1917, slowly building, and that it really began in earnest after the crisis, around 1945-1948, and that it lasted until roughly 1992.  And now it is totally over and done with, because we've all grown bored with it.

But I don't think this "postmodern era" was really postmodern, in the sense that I don't think that it came "after modernism," because I don't think modernism ever ended.  (In fact, I don't even think romanticism ever ended.)  I am an unabashed modernist.  Modern art is still being created.  Not only are there still people out there painting abstract expressionist paintings (of course there are, though they may not get all the attention and funding that they deserve) but, more to the point, there are people who are coming up with new artistic ideas, and that's what modernism is all about: the shock of the new.  For me, what is called "postmodernism" was a brief phase within the history of modernism.  A phase when the theme was exhaustion.  Mussolini, a paradigmatic postmodernist, once said that humanity had grown "tired of liberty."  That could be the slogan of postmodernism.  But, in saying that, Mussolini was being a provocateur - a kind of "troll" - and that kind of provocation is childish.  It's time to grow up.

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