Postmodern Art and Artificial Environment

During the 1960s and 1970s, artists were interested in rejecting the Modernist obsession with the aesthetic and began by questioning the formal qualities tied to this aesthetic .The goal of art in the post-modern standard is no longer predominantly behavioral, as it still was in the modern, but perceptive. The post-modern is the art of the artificial environment. Artists favored the readymade object as more powerful than the supposedly new crafted objects produced by Modernist artists. By willingly allowing the practice of appropriation that occurs within the production of all art, these artists pulled the power of pre-existing imagery and signs to produce “new” works with multiple layers and multiple meanings. In order to perceive the post-modern, you would have to be a witness, if not a participant, at a ritual, or crime, if you prefer logically in tune with what we see, hear, or touch, and trying to manage with the tactics involved in the ritual or the crime. Artists in the '60s and ‘70s cut their teeth on the ironies that surfaced in the assault fixed against the foundations of art and, by addition, those of central culture. The 1960s' and 1970s' postmodernism both rejected or criticized a certain version of modernism. Against the classified high modernism of the previous decades, the postmodernism of the 1960s tried to revive the legacy of the European avant-garde and to give it an American form along what one could call in short-hand the Duchamp-Cage-Warhol axis. By the 1970s, this avant-gardist postmodernism of the 1960s had in turn shattered its potential, even though some of its displays continued well into the new decade. This new type of art created and altered people’s perspective of art and how it affected art today...

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... or whether it is even possible to express those variances. One and Three Chairs is an artwork that challenges its viewers to consider how artworks engage their audiences. Postmodern art's real power comes from forcing the receiver of the art to question their assumptions about what “art” is, about who and what and how art is created, and how it is received. For example, Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ” is basically a picture of a crucifix in a bottle of urine. On the surface, it appears to be insulting religion. However, it makes a completely different point. The work says that we have crucified Christ in our pee. He's actually critiquing our postmodern cultural and artistic view. We have disregarded our most sacred conventions. We've thrown away all limits, rules, and boundaries. As such, our culture, our lives are as meaningful and pleasant as our own urine.