Higgins- Lyotard(9/24)

        What is Postmodernism? A complex question with a even more complex answer. Off the top of my head, I would define it as a period shift from modernism that includes a more broken-down to the core type of style. The era of postmodernism began to take place in the later part of the 20th century and is a way of relating/connecting culture and society to art. The author we looked at for Wednesday's class is Jean-Francois Lyotard on his piece, Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism? Lyotard opens up with the concept of Realism, but not necessarily the art style but rather the whole emotional ambiguity that is instilled in the critic and artist when a piece is being debated. "But in the diverse invitations to suspend artistic experimentation, there is an identical call for order, a desire for unity, for identity, Artists and writers must be brought back into the bosom of the community, or at least, if the latter is considered to be ill, they must be assigned the task of healing it. (Lyotard, 40)"

If a main premise of the ideology of modernism is that "at one point it was modern", then the difference of realism is a smaller gap then we thought. Creating something that can be perceived to be that of present day and of actual actuality is the idea but postmodernism takes it further than that. It revolutionizes the concept, to be more thorough of life itself. Going in to detail of the actions and reactions then relating those "eurekas" to something that exists today. "that which denies itself the solace of good forms , the consensus of a taste which would make it possible to share collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable.(Lyotard 46)."