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"If people in the media cannot decide whether they are in the business of reporting news or manufacturing propaganda, it is all the more important that the public understand that difference, and choose their news sources accordingly."
~Thomas Sowell

Kierkegaard points out that the media of "present day" tends to make news out of nothing, and this holds true today, especially with the increasingly common editorials posted as factual news. Sowell agrees, emphasizing how the news cares more about the spread of ideas (whatever the means) rather than the content of the ideas.
With all the "fake news" going around, it's important to judge our sources based on their commitment to showing no bias in their language or representation, a responsibility that lies not only with the consumer, but with the publisher as well.
Facebook is a large example of consumer unawareness as people frequently share news articles that have no context, causing mass confusion and misdirected anger.
Publisher bias can be found in many news channels, as some, notably Fox News, are notorious about telling only enough information to incite public unrest.

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After viewing Darwin's evolutionary claims, I couldn't help but view natural selection in the modern sense of education. So many kids are left behind by the educational system despite Bush's drive to have "No Child Left Behind."
If a child doesn't understand a concept in the given time frame a teacher has to teach it, either the child gets supplemental instruction or falls behind the other students.
And with each student naturally learning in different ways, forcing students to conform to a state standard and to test standardly, those who don't meet those standards aren't "naturally selected" to succeed and are left behind in the educational system to get their GED or to go into the workforce, holding a lesser chance of receiving higher education and higher pay.

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When you say one thing and mean your mother -- I mean another...

In this article, this author discusses Freud's idea that your innermost thoughts are brought out with a slip of the tongue -- that misspeaking is not just an accident, but a reflection of our unconscious; for someone who stumbles over her words frequently, the thought is mildly concerning.
After reading the article, I wonder whether this theory has merit considering Rudolph Meringer's experiment (as discussed in article). In his experiment -- given the small sample size and lack of repetition -- he decided that misspeaking is a result of how our mouth forms the words, not the meanings behind them.
There are many different theories as to why we slip up though, with some psychologists pointing to word formation and brain processing, to the unintentional reveal of what we were truly thinking about.

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It was 1988 and the then-vice president, George H. W. Bush, was on a routine visit to Idaho. He was supposed to give a dry speech on agricultural policy and praise his successes alongside President Reagan, live on television. Then he said: "We've had triumphs. Made some mistakes. We've had some sex... uh... setbacks."

Long after his political career is consigned to distant memory, President George Bush Senior will be celebrated for this legendary gaffe.

Ah, the Freudian slip. There are the things you want to say, the things you could get away with saying and the things it would be utterly disastrous to utter - which, invariably, are what actually comes out of your mouth. It's the greatest fear of any public speaker. But what really causes these errors? And do they have any hidden meaning?

For Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, it wasn't enough to simply ask his patients what they thought. Their true desires, he believed, could only be examined by paying attention to 'slips of the tongue' and other clues from the unconscious. A classic slip is, as the saying goes, when you say one thing and mean your mother.

Otherwise known as parapraxis, these verbal stumblings could reveal forbidden urges - such as sex and swearing - which were usually locked safely within the unconscious mind. Verbal errors aren't random at all, but puzzles to be decoded.

There's just one problem: Freudian slips, as with many of his other ideas, are extremely difficult to test. Freud may be as famous as Darwin, but many modern-day psychologists, linguists and neuroscientists think that he was wrong about almost everything. But was he wrong about this?

One ingenious early study used sex and electric shocks to find out. At the start of the experiment, two of three groups of heterosexual males were greeted by a middle-aged professor, while the third was ushered into a room with a provocatively dressed lab assistant. "We sort of went to the limits of what one might expect on campus. She was attractive and wearing a very short skirt and sort of a translucent blouse," says Michael Motley, a psychologist from the University of California Davis who co-authored the study.

Participants were asked to read a list of word pairs ('back mud', 'bat much', 'mad bug') silently, at a rate of one per second. What they didn't know was that the word pairs had been designed to induce 'spoonerisms', slip-ups named after the error-prone Reverend William Archibald Spooner, in which the initial sounds or letters in two words are switched.

Every so often the experimenters indicated, via a buzzer, for subjects to say a pair out loud. As Freud would have predicted, the men in the presence of the lab assistant made significantly more sex-based slip-ups ('fast passion' instead of 'past fashion' and 'happy sex' instead of 'sappy hex') than the control group, but no more slips overall.

Meanwhile the third group had their fingers hooked up to electrodes, plugged into a machine capable of delivering mild electric shocks. "We told the fellows - this was a lie, of course - there's a 70% chance you're going to get a shock," says Motley. Again, the students let slip what was really on their mind (misreading 'worst cottage' as 'cursed wattage' and 'shad bock' as 'bad shock').

Later the experimenters measured the participants' sexual anxiety and discovered, counter-intuitively, that those with the most carnal angst made the most sexual missteps. Why?

In attempting to suppress their urges, the men may have fallen victim to the 'white bear problem', first noticed by Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Try hard enough not to think of something, such as sex or a polar bear, and it will be all you can think about. It's the basis for The Game, a popular mind game which challenges players to avoid thinking about its existence. Let it sneak into your conscious and you lose, and must announce your loss out loud - causing everyone around you to lose also. To win... well no one's figured that one out yet.

Back in the 1980s, psychologist Daniel Wegner suggested that the very system which aims to prevent Freudian slips may be to blame. According to his theory, subconscious processes are continuously scouring our thoughts to keep our innermost desires locked away. When such a thought occurs, instead of remaining quiet - ironically - the thought may be announced to the conscious brain, causing you to think it.

Then it's only a matter of time before the truth slips out. "When we're thinking about something we're priming the relevant words, they're being prepared to be spoken in case we need them," says Motley. With so many options, the word we end up choosing can be revealing.

Take the sentence "The old hillbilly kept his moonshine in a big (blank)". In another version of the sexual arousal experiment, Motley asked participants to choose the last word. Lots of words - pitcher, barrel, jar - are viable candidates, but more often than not those who felt attracted to his lab assistant chose 'jugs'. "It's sort of doubly primed and it gets selected over the others. We think something similar is happening with Freudian slips," says Motley.

Deliberately try not to tell your gym partner "you're very fat - I mean fit!", blurt out "pornography" at a meeting rather than "photography" or call out your ex's name during sex, and you'll be inviting subconscious sabotage. To add insult to injury, being stressed makes these catastrophic blunders even more likely.

But not everyone is convinced. At the time, Freud's harshest critic was Austrian linguist Rudolf Meringer. While working at the University of Vienna in the late 19th Century, Meringer collected, catalogued and scrutinised thousands of verbal mistakes, mostly from lunchtime conversations with colleagues. The group would take turns speaking and when an error occurred, they would cease all conversation until it had been meticulously recorded.

From this record, Meringer concluded that slips of the tongue are intrusions of letters, not meaning. In fact, according to Rob Hartsuiker, a psycholinguist from Ghent University, the majority of errors are entirely innocent.

Take the unfortunate blunder by journalist Jim Naughtie, who slipped up while pronouncing the then-Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt's surname on BBC Radio 4's Today programme. At first glance it looks like a classic Freudian mishap; in fact, it reveals more about how the brain processes language than Naughtie's feelings about the politician.

A mountain of experimental evidence has shown that if two words share contextual meaning and a vowel, the initial consonants are at risk of getting mixed up. "I'm sure many people don't find Jeremy Hunt a very pleasant person, but it's actually an intrusion of the 'c' from culture," says Hartsuiker.

It's the result of the way words are accessed in the brain. First, one must be selected from a network of words which are organised by similarity and meaning - an opportunity to mix up Culture and Hunt. Once you have the word, the brain selects the word sounds - which is when the consonants are swapped. "This is very typical, and it's also something Freud rather ignored," says Hartsuiker. As the program's co-host pointed out at the time, you might say appointing a man with the name Hunt as the Culture Secretary was extremely reckless.

Despite these verbal traps, the average person slips up on fewer than 22 words per day out of around 15,000. Brain scans have shown that we routinely make embarrassing blunders while rehearsing our sentences in 'inner speech', but the majority are caught before we say them out loud. "What is produced at the end is correct but brainwaves reveal that internally they made the taboo mistake," says Hartsuiker, who co-authored the study.

We're probably more vulnerable to slips when we're distracted or our unconscious spellchecker isn't working properly - if we're nervous, tired, or intoxicated and as we get older. You're also more likely to trip up if you're talking too quickly.

In other words, our verbal slips may reveal something interesting about the way the brain processes language, and they may even suggest our current preoccupations we'd rather not discuss. But whether they ever tell our deepest secrets is still a matter of debate. Psychoanalysts like Rosine Perelberg from University College London certainly think they are important. "They are very much the stuff of jokes, but they are so precious because they betray something the person did not want to consciously reveal," she says. "We take them very seriously." She mentions a recent patient whose slip revealed subconscious anxieties about being violent towards his future child (he said battle instead of bottle).

Hartsuiker is sceptical. "The evidence for real Freudian slips is very, very limited indeed." For others, it's likely that the explanation depends on the slip. "Do I agree with Freud that all slips are Freudian? Well, no. But do I think that there is such a thing? Yes I think so," says Motley.

So which kind was President George W. Bush's slip-up? We'll never know for sure, but they were probably just partners in copulation... sorry... collaboration.

If you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called "If You Only Read 6 Things This Week". A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Earth, Culture, Capital, Travel and Autos, delivered to your inbox every Friday.

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What Freudian slips really reveal about your mind

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It was 1988 and the then-vice president, George H. W. Bush, was on a routine visit to Idaho. He was supposed to give a dry speech on agricultural policy and praise his successes alongside President Reagan, live on television. Then he said: "We've had triumphs. Made some mistakes. We've had some sex...

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There are a TON of political punk songs out there, but I felt like this one captured the realities of it, how Big Business tells you everything that they want you to think you need, but how none of it is truly satisfying. Billie Joe compares Black Friday to the "night of the living dead," commenting on how we're no better than zombies following the best sales, earning 10% off their coffins.
Dark imagery, sure, but it's a very different style than their usual music and denotes a more serious tone than those with the heavy guitar rifts and shouting. This is something that's affected him and he's trying to convey the depth that our lives revolve around this system.

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For those who had to read Animal Farm in high school, you may remember how what started as an equal society amongst the animals, created when they rebelled against the oppressive farmers, came full circle as the pigs assumed the role of the oppressors -- a fitting animal choice with a connotation to match. George Orwell framed the ideal communistic society and then brought it down because nothing can take greed, power craving, or a desire for influence away from humanity, not even the idea of universal equality.

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If you don't already know this about me, I LOVE space. The whole idea of there being this final frontier of unexplored unknown is absolutely fascinating. Scientists are constantly making claims about the universe and beyond, attempting to explain the vast mystery, only to recant their theory as soon as new information comes to light.
This article is about Stephen Hawking's new theory about black holes (with questionable support) and how it differs from the old theories. I feel like postmodernism connects well with this because in postmodernism, truth is relative to what we know and subject to change as soon as a new discovery is made.

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An artist's impression of a supermassive black hole at the centre surrounded by matter flowing onto the black hole in what is termed an accretion disk. Also shown is an outflowing jet of energetic particles, believed to be powered by the black hole's spin.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Famed astrophysicist Stephen Hawking has shaken up the popular science world with his newest study about the basic nature of black holes, but is his idea revolutionary? Some scientists aren't convinced.

Hawking's new black hole study - entitled "Information Preservation and Weather Forecasting for Black Holes" - was published Jan. 22 through the preprint journal arXiv.org and has not yet undergone the peer review vetting process typical for academic papers. It attempts to solve a paradox surrounding the basic building blocks of how the universe works.

"Hawking's paper is short and does not have a lot of detail, so it is not clear what his precise picture is, or what the justification is," Joseph Polchinski of the Kavli Institute wrote in an email to SPACE.com. [ The Strangest Black Holes in the Universe]

Current theories about black holes hinge upon what's known as the "firewall paradox." This paradox pits Einstein's theory of general relativity against quantum theory in the context of a black hole. The paradox, developed by Polchinski and colleagues about two years ago, is based upon a thought experiment about would happen to a person if he or she fell into a black hole.

If an astronaut fell into a black hole, according to Einstein's theory, he or she would simply float past a point known as the "event horizon" with "no drama." The event horizon refers to the point of no return at which not even light can escape from the black hole. The astronaut wouldn't realize he or she had drifted into the black hole at all. The black hole would then pull the astronaut apart before it crushed the space explorer into its dense core.

On the other side of the paradox lies quantum mechanics, the physics theory that explains the behavior of small particles. In the thought experiment, quantum theory suggests that an astronaut would not find a "no drama" area at the event horizon, but instead would encounter a " firewall" just inside the black hole that would destroy the unlucky traveler.

0 of 10 questions complete

In 1974, Stephen Hawking found that matter and energy can escape a black hole through what is now known as Hawking radiation. However, he contended that the radiation would be so scrambled that scientists could never work backwards to understand what fell into the black hole in the first place. This violates a basic piece of quantum theory, the idea that information cannot be destroyed.

In 2004, Hawking had a change of heart and admitted he was wrong about information loss. However, no one is quite sure how information could escape a black hole. Information radiating out of a black hole is not compatible with general relativity, and destroying information isn't possible within the confines of quantum theory. So, who is right?

Hawking's two-page study attempts to resolve the issue by doing away with event horizons and replacing them with the idea of "apparent horizons."

"The absence of event horizons means that there are no black holes - in the sense of regimes from which light can't escape to infinity," Hawking wrote. "There are, however, apparent horizons, which persist for a period of time."

These apparent horizons shift with the behavior of quantum particles within the black hole. This theory suggests, then, that information can radiate from the black hole.

However, this idea doesn't seem to address the firewall paradox at all, said Raphael Bousso, a theoretical physicist at the University of California, Berkeley.

"It's not possible to have both of those things, to have no drama at the apparent horizon and to have the information come out," Bousso told SPACE.com. "Stephen just doesn't discuss this argument, so it's unclear how he means to address it."

Don Page, physicist at the University of Alberta in Canada, agreed. "I do not think that eliminating event horizons by itself solves the firewall problem, which is a subtle problem," he wrote in an email.

And an event horizon-free black hole isn't a new proposal, either, Page said.

"The idea that a black hole does not truly have an event horizon goes back more than a third of a century, and I would not be surprised if someone could trace it back even many years earlier," Page told SPACE.com via email.

A new PBS documentary about Hawking's life and work is set to air Wednesday (Jan. 29) night. Check local listings.

Read Hawking's full study, called "Information Preservation and Weather Forecasting for Black Holes," on arXiv.org: http://arxiv.org/abs/1401.5761

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Stephen Hawking's New Black Hole Theory: Scientists Remain Unconvinced

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Famed astrophysicist Stephen Hawking has shaken up the popular science world with his newest study about the basic nature of black holes, but is his idea revolutionary? Some scientists aren't convinced. Hawking's new black hole study - entitled "Information Preservation and Weather Forecasting for Black Holes" - was published Jan.

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(preface, the lyrics don't line up exactly, which is annoying, but oh well)
This video is a satire of postmodernism and I thought it worked well in calling out the "not-caring" stereotype that many people have of postmodenism. People have this view because the idea behind postmodernism is that nothing can be defined or discovered, so what's the point, in a sense. Either way, it's an interesting video.

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The Bedroom Philosopher - I'm So Post Modern Video

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Official video to the hilarious song "I'm So Post Modern" by The Bedroom Philosopher. Touring the East Coast in Aug/Sep: http://www.facebook.com/events/243048259148206/ New book available here: http://thebedroomphilosopher.bigcartel.com/product/the-bedroom-philosopher-diaries Taken from 'In Bed With My Doona.' twitter.com/beddyphil

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Are morals still relative or has the criteria changed?

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Are morals still relative or has the criteria changed?

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This was an interesting article I found that claims that our society falls into a postmodernist viewpoint, but continues to shame people for not aligning with their own views -- which goes against the whole "you have your truth, I have mine" philosophy associated with postmodernism. It's hypothesized that morals aren't completely subjective, but the criteria for social acceptability has changed.

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Considered by conservatives to be one of postmodern society's greatest threats, moral relativism may now be a relic of the past.

Ben Earp / AP

Four years before he was hoisted to Speaker of the House, a smooth-faced Representative Paul Ryan declared, "If you ask me what the biggest problem in America is, I'm not going to tell you debt, deficits, statistics, economics-I'll tell you it's moral relativism." It was a bold claim given the depth of the economic recession, which began years earlier. But Ryan was echoing the sentiments of his conservative ancestors who'd made similar claims.

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Moral relativism has been a conservative boogeyman since at least the Cold War. Conservative stalwarts like William F. Buckley claimed that liberals had accepted a view that morality was culturally or historically defined-"what's right for you may not be right for me"-instead of universal and timeless. It's true that the ethical framework was en vogue, particularly in places of higher education. Liberal college professors stocked conservatives' arsenals with copious quotes to back up the claim that a squishy, flimsy understanding of morality had taken root in America.

Many conservatives-and not just Paul Ryan-still drag out the old bogeyman when they want to scare the masses and rally the troops. But the prevailing thought of the second decade of the 21st century is not like the mid-to late-20th century. Law, virtue, and a shame culture have risen to prominence in recent years, signaling that moral relativism may be going the way of the buggy whip.

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Considered by conservatives to be one of postmodern society's greatest threats, moral relativism may now be a relic of the past. Four years before he was hoisted to Speaker of the House, a smooth-faced Representative Paul Ryan declared, "If you ask me what the biggest problem in America is, I'm not going to tell you debt, deficits, statistics, economics-I'll tell you it's moral relativism."

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Welcome to Night Vale is a podcast that's a strange mixture of funny, strange, and existential, and I would recommend it to anyone with a different sense of humor.

There is one (somewhat long) quote from Cecil -- a radio host -- that I pulled out of e5, and it says:
"And now, a continuation of our previous investigation into whether I am literally the only person in the world, speaking to myself in a fit of madness caused by my inability to admit the tragedy of my own existence. Leland, our newest intern, recently brought me a cup of coffee. He is no longer in my field of vision, but I do still have the cup of coffee, which is well made and is giving me the needed pick me up to continue considering this terrifying possibility. Is it possible that I only imagined Leland and forgot making myself this cup of coffee? But then, who would have grown this coffee? Where was this cup procured from? Oh. Leland’s back in the room. He’s waving at me. Hello Leland."

I found the quote funny when I first heard it, but upon deeper consideration it's alarming to consider the world around you and realize that you only ever see it from your perspective. Everything you've ever seen, thought or felt has your bias on it and it's entirely possible none of it's real.  I have faith that it is real, but there's no way to actually prove anything. Crazy.

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I remember reading Walden back in 9th grade and in the discussions this week about fighting vs surrendering to Nature, I couldn't help but recall Henry David Thoreau's societal exclusion experiment where he built a cabin on Walden Pond (owned by his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson) and attempted to live as one with the local flora and fauna.
Even though he attempted to escape society, society never left him as his "war" with ants reminded him of human warfare, and he finds himself seeking company with his friends back in the city. After two years Thoreau returns to civilization, but not before serving a night in jail for refusing to pay his taxes (on the grounds that the government supported slavery).

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." ~ Thoreau

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Hicks says: "Tolerance is good and dominance is bad—but when postmodernists come to power, political correctness follows."

Political correctness is a word that gets thrown around a lot today, but while the thought behind it is good, it can have serious side effects as seen in this article which examines how far is too far with correctness.

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When you think of challenges facing free speech at universities, high-profile events likely come to mind: right-wing personalities Milo Yiannopoulos and Ben Shapiro at Berkeley, scholar Charles Murray at Middlebury College or Education Secretary Betsy DeVos wherever she goes.

Students (and often professors) who don't like invited guests feel they have the right to shout down these speakers - or prevent the talks from happening in the first place. Combine that with university sanctioned "free speech zones" and "safe spaces," and it doesn't take long to see how First Amendment rights are at risk on the quad.

As a conservative on a liberal campus, Grant Strobl, a senior at the University of Michigan and national chairman of Young Americans for Freedom, knows these problems firsthand. He points to a survey that shows most students care about free speech, but they don't know what the First Amendment actually protects. Throw in how universities coddle students (UM has a "bias incident response team," and Berkeley has offered counseling to students offended by conservative speakers), and no wonder students are acting out.

"There seems to be confusion on what speech is protected speech, and universities are contributing to that confusion," Strobl says. "A lot of the problem comes from political correctness."

Free speech proponents highlight an incident at UM to justify action by state legislatures.

In September 2016, the Michigan Political Union, a nonpartisan group that hosts student debates, put forth this topic: "Black Lives Matter is harmful to racial relations in the United States."

Controversial, sure, but a relevant subject. Yet students never got the chance to discuss it because several hundred protesters showed up and made the debate impossible.

Stanley Kurtz, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, describes it for National Review Online: "Protesters jeered and hurled obscenity-laced tirades at the debaters."

And even though UM has a policy that protests shouldn't "unduly interfere" with speakers and their audience, it didn't do any good - and there weren't repercussions for protesting students. In fact, Kurtz notes a student who wrote a piece for the student paper ahead of time, making the case that a debate about Black Lives Matter was offensive and racist, received a " feminist practice " award from the school's Women's Studies department in April for her work on campus.

So Kurtz has joined forces with the Goldwater Institute in promoting its model campus speech legislation.

"You can't have debates on campus with who can shout the loudest," says Jim Manley, senior attorney with Goldwater. "The astonishing thing is just how often it happens. There is no right to shout in someone's face with a bullhorn."

In Michigan, Sen. Patrick Colbeck, R-Canton, introduced bills earlier this year based on the framework. The legislation would force universities to document free speech incidents, and it also includes disciplinary action against students who interfere with or prevent the speech of others (due process rights of accused students are taken into account).

House members are concerned, too. Rep. Jim Runestad, R-White Lake, proposes a constitutional amendment to "clarify that public university autonomy does not preclude the Legislature from protecting free speech rights provided in the Michigan Constitution."

Others, including the proposal from the American Legislative Exchange Council, caution that any remedies be weighted against their potential to quash or chill any student speech.

Students do themselves a disservice when they silence the open debate of ideas and shield themselves from other perspectives. But in the end, it's up to university administrators to enforce their speech policies and make sure they aren't inhibiting the rights of any students - even conservative ones.

ijacques@detroitnews.com

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Jacques: Political correctness gone wild on campus

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When you think of challenges facing free speech at universities, high-profile events likely come to mind: right-wing personalities Milo Yiannopoulos and Ben Shapiro at Berkeley, scholar Charles Murray at Middlebury College or Education Secretary Betsy DeVos wherever she goes.

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This article defines and examines the genre of postmodern art and details how art has shifted societal expectations in it's aim to get a reaction from people. It mentions the rise of Feminist and minority artworks from this movement as a rejection of the idea that men are the only ones who can be "creative geniuses" and that minorities are inferior. The invention of post-modern art is in itself a rejection of modernist ideals, leaving the question of is it a style in itself or a transitionary stage?

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"Modern art is merely the means by which we terrorize ourselves."

Synopsis

Postmodernism is best understood by defining the modernist ethos it replaced - that of the avant-garde who were active from 1860s to the 1950s. The various artists in the modern period were driven by a radical and forward thinking approach, ideas of technological positivity, and grand narratives of Western domination and progress. The arrival of Neo-Dada and Pop art in post-war America marked the beginning of a reaction against this mindset that came to be known as postmodernism. The reaction took on multiple artistic forms for the next four decades, including Conceptual art, Minimalism, Video art, Performance art, and Installation art. These movements are diverse and disparate but connected by certain characteristics: ironical and playful treatment of a fragmented subject, the breakdown of high and low culture hierarchies, undermining of concepts of authenticity and originality, and an emphasis on image and spectacle. Beyond these larger movements, many artists and less pronounced tendencies continue in the postmodern vein to this day.

Key Ideas

Postmodernism is distinguished by a questioning of the master narratives that were embraced during the modern period, the most important being the notion that all progress - especially technological - is positive. By rejecting such narratives, postmodernists reject the idea that knowledge or history can be encompassed in totalizing theories, embracing instead the local, the contingent, and the temporary. Other narratives rejected by postmodernists include the idea of artistic development as goal-oriented, the notion that only men are artistic geniuses, and the colonialist assumption that non-white races are inferior. Thus, Feminist art and minority art that challenged canonical ways of thinking are often included under the rubric of postmodernism or seen as representations of it.

Postmodernism overturned the idea that there was one inherent meaning to a work of art or that this meaning was determined by the artist at the time of creation. Instead, the viewer became an important determiner of meaning, even allowed by some artists to participate in the work as in the case of some performance pieces. Other artists went further by creating works that required viewer intervention to create and/or complete the work.

The Dada readymade had a marked influence on postmodernism in its questioning of authenticity and originality. Combined with the notion of appropriation, postmodernism often took the undermining of originality to the point of copyright infringement, even in the use of photographs with little or no alteration to the original.

The idea of breaking down distinctions between high and low art, particularly with the incorporation of elements of popular culture, was also a key element of postmodernism that had its roots in the late-19 th and early-20 th centuries in the work of Edgar Degas, for example, who painted on fans, and later in Cubism where Pablo Picasso often included the lyrics of popular songs on his canvases. This idea that all visual culture is not only equally valid, but that it can also be appreciated and enjoyed without any aesthetic training, undermines notions of value and artistic worth, much like the use of readymades.

Most Important Art

Postmodern Art Artworks in Focus:

Beginnings

The first signs of postmodernism were evident in the early-20 th century with Dada artists who ridiculed the art establishment with their anarchic actions and irreverent performances. The term, however, was not used in the contemporary sense until 1979 in the philosopher J.F. Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition. In art, the term is usually applied to movements that emerged beginning in the late 1950s in reaction to the perceived failures and/or excesses of the modernist epoch.

Modernism

From the late-19 th to the mid-20 th century, art as well as literature, science, and philosophy was defined by a sense of progress and technological advancement, brought about by the industrial revolution and affiliation with the positivity of modern life. Artists such as Paul Cézanne and Piet Mondrian strove to find a universal means of expression through the increasing abstraction of their subject. Other artists who focused on the subjective and the forbidden, such as Salvador Dalí or Marcel Duchamp were seen as outliers in this emphasis on progress and rationality and their work became precursors to postmodernism. By the 1930s in certain artistic circles, the process of painting, once the means to depict a subject through the use of line, color, and form, became the subject itself. This emphasis on formalism was first observed and championed in the U.S. by Clement Greenberg, an art critic and fierce proponent of modernism. His theoretical writings are often seen as the antithesis of postmodernism because of their advocating of artistic purity and for their singular focus on formalism at the expense of subject matter. By the time the Abstract Expressionists were painting in New York lofts in the 1940s, representation had been entirely eliminated in favor of a direct gestural expression that focused on paint application rather than narrative. Fundamental to the modernist avant-garde artist was individuality, autonomy, and the tendency for radical experimentation in search of an ultimate truth or meaning.

The Modernist-Postmodernist Crossover

By the middle of the century, the Western world had experienced a major paradigm shift: two devastating world wars, millions of lives lost, communist ideologies shattered, and nuclear weapons utilized. The modernist optimism that had dominated in a pre-war world now seemed irrelevant, outdated, and doomed to fail. Europe was no longer the center of modern art or the avant-garde. The focus of the art world now moved to New York City and to the Abstract Expressionists who were flourishing in a new era of reinvigorated post-war capitalism. This group, however, was still very much marked by their modernism, with the movement staunchly supported by Greenberg as a high art toward which all art had been inexorably moving since the 19 th century. Meanwhile, outside this high art enclave, America in the 1950s was experiencing a consumerist and cultural boom as well as a stormy political climate. Once Abstract Expressionism became a mainstream movement, young artists began to question it for its lack of reference both to the state of the world and to the flourishing popular culture of which its artists were a part. Motivated by these feelings and with a desire to create an art that acknowledged everyday life, artists such as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg began to experiment with new styles that borrowed and recreated imagery from the mass culture that surrounded them. The Neo-Dada style with which they would become associated was arguably the first of the genuinely postmodern art movements. These artists were influenced by John Cage, and many of their experiments would give rise to Pop art and Minimalism.

Concepts and Styles

Postmodernism cannot be described as a coherent movement and lacks definitive characteristics. It can be better understood instead as a set of styles and attitudes that were affiliated in their reaction against modernism. A new approach to popular culture and the mass media emerged in the 1950s, sparking a wave of art movements that reintroduced representation from disparate sources and experimented with image, spectacle, aesthetic codes, disciplinary boundaries, originality, and viewer involvement in ways that challenged previous definitions of art.

High vs. Low culture

"High culture" is a term used to describe traditional fine arts, such as painting and sculpture. The term is commonly employed by the art critic to evoke class, quality, and authenticity. It is also used to distinguish types of art media and disciplines from the "low," "kitsch," or popular culture of mass-produced commodities, magazines, television, and pulp fiction that took America by storm in the post-war consumerist boom. In his definitive essay 'Avant-Garde and Kitsch,' Clement Greenberg warned the modernist avant-garde against association with what he considered philistine outpourings. Greenberg proposed instead that artists' concerns should be reserved for an art that could transform society. The postmodernists, in response, embraced the "popular" wholeheartedly and made it central to their work. Pop artists recreated the mundane objects of consumerism, but used humor and irony to transform these into gigantic soft forms (Claes Oldenburg) or into cultural icons (Andy Warhol) while the Minimalists used industrial materials to create repetitive forms reminiscent of the industrial production line. The "popular" emerged as both the subject and the medium for many artists and commercialism was embraced. This focus on "low" culture stretched the definition of art, while also providing social critique.

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Postmodern Art Overview Continues

Image and Spectacle

In this new era of consumerism and television, advertising and the mass media became increasingly pervasive. In 1968, for example, the American public witnessed uncensored footage of the Vietnam War in their own homes for the first time, providing a stark disconnect with their own comfortable lives as they witnessed the horrors of war over dinner. Images on the screen were reflecting a new reality and it was often more difficult to distinguish between fact and fiction, particularly with the widespread use of advertising. Jean Baudrillard, a prominent French philosopher, called this situation "hyperreality," likening postmodern existence to a flickering TV screen: immediate, shifting, and fragmented, with no underlying truth. These new ideas inspired artists, such as Barbara Kruger, who began to depict the surface rather than any truth or deeper meaning. Style and spectacle, rather than substance, was where meaning was created. This focus on surface is one of the key components of Kruger's I Shop therefore I Am (1987) as well as much of Pop art. Simultaneously, a camp aesthetic was born, particularly evident in fashion and music, that drew from past styles of Gothic and Baroque; the more dazzling, flamboyant, and shocking - the more effective. The work of Jeff Koons is a good example of this aspect of postmodern art.

Mixing of Aesthetic Codes

Modernism had first emerged in 19 th century France in rebellion against the historical and figurative preoccupation of the French Academy and its dominance over artistic taste. The avant-garde movements that followed in the early-20 th century gradually eliminated any references to a context or subject, in search of a pure and unmediated form of visual expression that was radical and new. This trend reached its apogee with Abstract Expressionism, which championed non-representational painting. However, in the decades that followed the movement, painting as a medium was considered cliche with little room left for experimentation. With the advent of postmodernism, some artists began exploring past styles and media - particularly painting - as part of the postmodern aesthetic that brought back both the historical and the subjective but with a purposeful lack of stylistic integrity or unity.

Artists such as Gerhard Richter playfully mixed aesthetic codes and genres, displacing existing meaning in structures and creating new ones. Using methods of parody and pastiche, old ideas could be recreated in new contexts. As the Dadaists had done earlier, other artists used collage, assemblage, and bricolage that juxtaposed text, image, and found objects to create layered surfaces. This mixing of codes is particularly evident in the architecture of the 1980s and 1990s, such as The Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery, UK that combines features from two different historical periods into one visual spectacle. In film, the effect could be enhanced considerably. For example, Quentin Tarantino's, Pulp Fiction (1994) defies traditional narrative, drawing from multiple genres and offering a fragmented montage of characters and plots in an arbitrary order. Many artists also turned to multimedia technologies during the 1960s and 1970s, relishing the new opportunities that they were afforded to combine media and to create spectacle and sensation.

There were not just opportunities with new multimedia technologies; from the 1950s and 1960s onwards, there was a significant crossover between artistic disciplines as traditional categories were superseded. A popular postmodernist phrase was "anything goes," which referred both to this growing convergence culture as well as to the collapse of the distinction between "good" and "bad" taste and the difficulty of assigning value or judging works of art based on traditional criteria as in the case with Jeff Koons. Artists adopted the mechanisms of both art and non-art forms, such as advertising, using a multitude of media to convey multiple messages.

Originality and Authenticity

In 1911, Marcel Duchamp placed a urinal signed with a fictional name in an exhibit and called it art. In doing so he mocked the entire foundations on which the institution of art had been built. Traditionally, uniqueness and originality gave an artwork its value or "aura," both in symbolic and monetary terms, and was a concept preserved through modernist art criticism. In 1936, cultural theorist, Walter Benjamin, wrote a seminal essay entitled "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," which radically reworked this view, laying charges of elitism at the feet of key figures such as Greenberg. Benjamin claimed that reproduction, through printing and other methods, could achieve the democratization of art because of its lower commodity value and increased accessibility to the masses.

Pop artists, minimalists, performance artists, conceptual artists, and others adopted Benjamin's ethos, interpreting his words through a diverse range of media and techniques that undermined concepts of authenticity and value and distorted commoditization. Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol mass-produced bags and mugs, screen printed with iconic imagery. Oldenburg, who fervently embraced the notion that anything could and should be art, opened a store that was devoted to selling such cheap examples of art, with prices starting at $21.79. Donald Judd and Sol LeWitt exhibited their repetitive forms, but left control of their arrangement to the curator; Allan Kaprow, Marina Abramovic, and the Fluxus artists put on performances in which the audience and not the artist determined their form and meaning. Artists of all stripes, including Warhol, Richter, and Koons, were known for their appropriation of photographic and other imagery. Within Feminist art of the 1970s and again in the 1990s, among certain artists there was a surge of interest in the idea of collective authorship that further undermined traditional ideas of creativity and artistic genius that had been in place since the Renaissance. Artists such as Philippe Parreno and Daniel Buren were increasingly concerned with the social process of art making rather than the art object, and placed the creation of meaning at the point of interaction. This new practice became known as Relational Aesthetics, and resisted commoditization of art through its performative nature, providing both an institutional and modernist critique.

Pluralism

The postmodern pursuit for a democratic art extended beyond reproduction, appropriation, and experiments in collective authorship. Modernist art was not just seen as elitist but also as white, Western, and male-dominated. Postmodernism coincided with the rise in Feminism, the civil rights movement, the fight for LGBT rights and postcolonial thought, and provoked a concern for a more pluralist approach; in other words, many artists such as Kara Walker and Felix Gonzalez-Torres began to address subjects from multiple perspectives to include the viewpoints of previously underrepresented positions. In addition, philosophers at the time, like Michel Foucault and Antonio Gramsci, were turning to the ideas of post-structuralism, which understood society's institutions, such as prisons and hospitals, as being underpinned by shifting rather than stable systems giving them a lack of coherent meaning. The impact on the arts was the increased representation of diverse, multicultural identities and also a playful treatment of identity and the self, evident in the early works of artists such as Barbara Kruger or Cindy Sherman. This is true of Sherman in particular, whose work focuses on the rift between an identity constructed through film or other media and the reality of women's experiences. In doing so, Sherman draws the audience's attention to the means of production and its polysemic nature, highlighting the fact that a work of art can be interpreted in any number of ways by an audience, thus resisting master narratives and the ultimate authority of the artist.

Later Developments

There are currently two main theoretical approaches to understanding postmodernism, its relation to modernism, and its place in the contemporary art world.

Continual Build-up on Modernism

One argument is that postmodernism both disrupts and continues modernism as there is evidence of both existing in contemporary art, which is a term that broadly refers to any art created within the last twenty years, thus encompassing all art production of any style. The attitudes and styles that mark postmodernism can be understood as paradigmatic shifts that mark a rupture or crisis in cultural history. From this viewpoint, the impact of postmodern, post-colonial and post-feminist thought has sparked a sea of change in art, described by feminist writers such as Rosalind Krauss and Suzanne Lacy. Certainly, the diverse, ephemeral, globally focused, cross disciplinary, and collaborative nature of contemporary art practice is informed by postmodernist attitudes and appears both persistent and transformative. Postmodernism claims to close the gap between "high" and "low" culture and "good" and "bad" taste, yet there is evidence that these distinctions remain. In the early 1990s, a group of young Goldsmiths College students put together a graduate show called Sensations - a highly postmodern concept. The reaction was unprecedented. Public and critics alike expressed shock and appall at the provocative imagery and explicit references to subjects of "bad" taste. The group became known as the Young British Artists (YBAs) and sparked a revival in conceptual art using shock tactics to question art's meaning, as Duchamp had done nearly 80 years earlier. Their notoriety has persisted, as has the furor over Sensations, providing evidence for some that the old taste hierarchies of modernism live on. With this argument, postmodernism has not replaced modernism but coexists alongside it.

The Age of Post Postmodernism

Another view, which has recently emerged in a small but persuasive body of writing, argues that we have moved on into a post postmodernist era. Some writers and critics claim that postmodernism is outdated and they question the value of a movement sustained by superficiality, cynicism, and nihilism. Some even argue for a return to the principles of modernism, albeit in different forms. Edward Docx calls this post-postmodern era the "Age of Authenticity" characterized by a revival of authenticity and craftsmanship over style and concept. Other monikers include "alter modernism," which is Nicolas Bourriaud's term for the "nonstop communication and globalization" culture of today, and "pseudo modernism," which was coined by Alan Kirby. Kirby claims there has been a shift from audience spectatorship to a more active yet trivial participation, evident in reality TV voting culture. These attempts to claim the end of postmodernism are wide-ranging and generally nonconsensual but are united in elements of their critique. They are all weary of the relentlessness of postmodern irony, and yearn for some return to truth and reality. In different ways they undermine postmodernism's dominance as a way of thinking or as an attitude to life, reducing it instead to one movement in a long history of movements, one that is now in its demise.

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Postmodern Art - Modern Art Terms and Concepts

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"Modern art is merely the means by which we terrorize ourselves." Postmodernism is best understood by defining the modernist ethos it replaced - that of the avant-garde who were active from 1860s to the 1950s. The various artists in the modern period were driven by a radical and forward thinking approach, ideas of technological positivity, and grand narratives of Western domination and progress.

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Jenson talks about how we've reached the idea of the "last man" but our superman is nowhere yet to be found. We're waiting for reform, expectant for change, but it hasn't come as of yet, so we stay in a transitional state. This movie I found -- though I have not seen the film, the trailer offers a good idea of the plot -- highlights the struggle of waiting for change in an educational setting, condemning the educational system for failing the children passing through it. As a teaching candidate, this speaks to me because I crave to be a difference for students, but struggle in trying to understand how I can change the faulty system from within.

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Directed by Davis Guggenheim. With Charles Adam, Charles Adams, Jonathan Alter, Robert Balfanz. An examination of the current state of education in America today.