Postmodernism is the name for the period and way of thinking that came after modernism and called into question its faith in progress, a unified style and a single truth. Instead of one movement succeeding another, a multiplicity of voices arrives. Artists borrow freely from art history and from popular culture, mix high with low and like to work with irony. In Edutéka I sum it up by saying that postmodernism declared the end of the grand narratives. What is valued is individuality, topicality and a grounding in the history of art.
The term began to be used in art around 1970. Its theoretical foundation came from the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard in his book La Condition postmoderne (1979), where he described a distrust of grand narratives (metanarratives, that is, sweeping explanations of the world such as the belief in constant progress). Its roots go deeper, though, to the pop art and conceptual art of the 1960s. So the boundary is not sharp. Is postmodernism a movement in its own right, or rather the mood of a whole era?
Internationally they include Cindy Sherman, who in the series Untitled Film Stills (1977 to 1980) poses in the guise of stock film heroines, Jeff Koons with his stainless steel casts of inflatable toys, and the feminist collective Guerrilla Girls. A typical method is appropriation (taking over someone else's image and shifting it into a new meaning). The Czech contribution? The arrival of postmodernism here is linked above all to the group Tvrdohlaví (The Stubborn Ones), founded in 1987 in Prague's Municipal House. Its members included Jiří David, Stanislav Diviš, Petr Nikl, František Skála and Jaroslav Róna.
The best-known market milestone is Koons's Rabbit of 1986, which sold at Christie's in May 2019 for 91.1 million dollars. It was then a record for a living artist and comfortably beat its estimate of 50 to 70 million dollars. On the Czech market, works by Tvrdohlaví also appear at domestic auctions, and the postmodern generation of the 1980s was collected systematically by, for example, the Brno collector Karel Tutsch, whose collection is now in the Gallery of Modern Art in Hradec Králové. Is postmodernism worth collecting? For collectors it is a bridge between classic modernism and contemporary art. Whoever understands it reads what is being made today better too.
— Anna Pulkertová, founder of Art Part Club
Related terms: Modern art · Pop art · Conceptual art · Contemporary art · Kitsch art
