Postmodern art
Art that challenges modernist ideals through quotation, appropriation, irony, pluralism, and blurred boundaries between high and popular culture.
Appropriation art: Art that reuses existing images, objects, or styles, often to alter their meaning or question authorship. Its reuse of familiar imagery makes appropriation a defining postmodern strategy.
Marilyn Diptych: Andy Warhol’s 1962 silkscreen painting repeats Marilyn Monroe’s publicity photograph in changing colors and fading tones. Its repetition turns a mass-media portrait into an emblem of postmodern image culture.
Andy Warhol: An American artist whose paintings, prints, films, and installations drew heavily on consumer goods and mass media. Warhol blurred the distinction between fine art and commercial imagery through repetition and appropriation.
Abstract Expressionism: A postwar American painting movement emphasizing abstraction, gesture, and the individual artist’s expressive presence. Its ideal of singular artistic expression contrasts with postmodern quotation and borrowed imagery.
Death of the author: A theory that an author’s intended meaning does not control how a text is interpreted. Appropriation art makes the authority of an image’s original maker especially contentious.
Pastiche: An artwork or style that combines or imitates elements from earlier works or traditions. Postmodern works often assemble historical styles without claiming a single original source.
Untitled Film Stills: Cindy Sherman’s series of black-and-white photographs, made from 1977 to 1980, depicts staged scenes resembling film stills. Sherman’s invented images expose how media conventions shape identities and representations.
Cindy Sherman: An American artist known for photographs in which she stages herself in constructed roles and scenes. Her photographs reveal identity as something shaped by images, genres, and social expectations.
Minimalism: An art movement that uses reduced forms, repeated units, and industrial materials to limit personal expression. Postmodern art often answers Minimalism’s restraint with historical references and visual eclecticism.
Institutional critique: Artistic practice that examines how museums, galleries, and cultural institutions shape art and its meaning. Postmodern skepticism extended from artworks to the institutions that classify and display them.