Modernism and Postmodernism

The certain period usually has its own visual culture and style. Based on these factors, we can easily recognize from what period is each piece of art. In 60's, people were separating culture into two groups, 'high culture' and 'low culture'. Behind the term of high culture we find theatre, opera, art museums or ballet. These are high preferable aspects of art with strong history and traditions in human culture. Low culture contains new art styles, which did not have much world spreading at beginning, for example as pop art or use of collage in paintings. As a good example of start of pop art is painting of Richard Hamilton from 1964. In this painting he tried to represent what life was at 1960's. Here we can see how he used collage of different images from this period, as for example television, 'Gammon ham', which was big thing in 60's, or photo of athletic man ( Mr. Universe ). By all these symbols, he wanted to show what to show iconic image of modern family home in this period. Even next world famous pop art piece is massive painting of artist Ray Lichtenstein in comics book style. What pop artists wanted to try to say is that pop culture is modern way of high culture and it is important. In simple term it is the fight between modernism and postmodernism. In the timeline, modernism has started around 1900 - 1950. Then, it took about ten years of transition period when it turned into post modernism ( since 1960 ).

One from the main characteristic of modernism is that everything is objective, has logical explanation and that there is believe in progress, like grand nartifs ( bible and religion ) or 'Marxism", which believes that world always move forward. It is based on process of 'Dialectic', what means that the idea ( thesis ) combined with anti - idea (anti - thesis ) always creates new idea ( synthesis ). But this does not work always, for example cold war between America and Russia, or second world war where term of 'idea" was based on german democratic and anti - idea was Hitler himself, who completely wiped out democracy and took it backward, so it was opposite of synthesis. One from next modernism's characteristics is believe in new technology and that it is giving us a progress. People started use new and up - to - date materials and designs in every industry, like in architecture where were rapid increase of use of glass materials on buildings. Even at nowadays, proof of modernism of still here around use.

Post modernism is opposite and it is based on bigger subjectivity than objectivity and sentence of "enjoy what you have". A number of characteristic factors of post modernism is 'shallow - ness', what makes us not think deeply about things, so if it looks good, its good. Next important factor of post modernism is 'minimalism'. By this term, it is "cut away back" system. For example we can see progress of minimalism in web design, where early web sites with many bright colors, fonts and chaotic layouts turned into more simple and clear web design with easy layout, white background etc. Also this idea has presented Robert Lowie on his Coca - Cola bottle design, when he tried to present rule of "less is more". At the present, we have to try minimalise each thing or design.

So if we would like to compare differences between modernism and post modernism, as example we can use differences of television and iPad. iPad perfectly contains characteristics of post modernism, such as minimalism because of its size, thickness and style, shallow - ness by own iPad only because of reason that it is big boom, stylish and person just wants to be seen with it. Also there is present of intertextuality what is simply put together more things together, in iPad such as tv, music, books etc.