Saturday, February 2, 2008

Week 4 – Barker, Chapter 7

Post-modernism is born out of modernism, or rather as an answer to modernism.
Modernism is focused on science, rational thinking and has this idea that there are absolute values and truths.

The postmodernist way of thinking has a whole different view on reality, claiming that there is not one truth but several, which opens the door to tolerance and acceptance of the other, but which also seems to come with a good dose of irony and a blurring of cultural boundaries. Bricolage and intertexutality are good examples of this.

I personally enjoy immensely discovering cultural mixes in art. Jacques Loussier playing Bach with a jazz band, bluesman Taj Mahal producing a CD with Malian kora player Toumami Diabate, Albert Schweitzer mixing some of Bach’s classical masterpieces with African rythms, the Klazz brothers playing classical pieces with a Cuban touch… and this is just music.
I guess postmodernism grew in such a way because technology enabled it to.
As Barker says: “It represents a cultural style of late capitalism operating in a new global space.”

1 comment:

gandyman said...

I, Chris Gandy, have responded to your blog post. You can check it out at: http://gandymusings.blogspot.com