What Is Postmodern Art?
I get this question a lot in the gallery. Here’s the short answer: postmodern art is basically everything happening right now. It grew out of a reaction to modernism, which ran the show from the early 1900s through the 1960s. Modernism was about pushing boundaries, but still within a framework — abstraction, surrealism, cubism, etc. Postmodernism came along and said, “Forget the framework. Rules? What rules? Art can be anything.”
This shift really took hold in the late ’60s and early ’70s, right when the world itself was in chaos, Vietnam, the Cold War, social upheaval. Artists weren’t just recording what was happening anymore; they were also wrestling with how it felt to live in such uncertain times. Suddenly, performance art, pop art, conceptual art — things that didn’t necessarily fit in a neat little frame above your couch — started taking center stage.
So what makes postmodern art, well, postmodern? Textbooks like to sum it up with words like pluralism, irony, and a rejection of grand narratives. Translation: art could mean multiple things at once, it could be funny or satirical, and it didn’t have to serve some lofty, universal “truth.” High art — the kind reserved for elites and collectors — began to crumble. Anyone could look at a piece and decide for themselves whether it was meaningful, ridiculous, or both.
Pop art is the clearest example. Andy Warhol turned soup cans and celebrities into icons, while Roy Lichtenstein blew up comic panels into fine art. Advertising and mass media became fair game. Suddenly, what was once “low culture” was not only allowed into the gallery — it was the main event.
And it wasn’t just paintings. Carolee Schneemann brought raw physicality into her performances, Yoko Ono blurred the line between art and celebrity, and Cindy Sherman reshaped how we think about identity through photography. Museums like MoMA and Tate Modern quickly caught on and started collecting their works alongside the Picassos and Cezannes.
Interestingly, if you rewind a few decades, the seeds were already there. The Dada movement in WWI Zurich was all about nonsense, absurdity, and rebellion. Duchamp putting a urinal in a gallery? That was proto-postmodernism at its finest. The idea that something could be art simply because the artist said so is still one of the juiciest debates in the art world today. And that brings us to the 6.2M for a duct-taped banana...need I say more?
I feel so fortunate to be an artist right now in history - there really are no rules.
