n : art and literature and especially architecture in reaction against principles and practices of established modernism
DJ-ism and Postmodernism
Because his [the DJ] artistry comes from combining other people's art, because his performance is made from other musicians' performances, the DJ is the epitome of a postmodern artist. Quite simply, DJing is all about mixing things together.
The DJ uses records to make a musical collage, just like Quentin Tarantino might make a new movie which is just a lot of scenes copied from old movies or an architect might build a skyscraper shaped like a grandfather clock. This is the essence of postmodernism: nicking forms and ideas that are already around and combining them creatively.
A few 'avant-garde' DJs have successfully pulled such pretentious wool over the eyes of the more academic music critics. We'd argue that DJ Spooky, the New York-based DJ who coined the genre name 'illbient' (among others), owes most of his success to the fact that he can make DJing sound really complicated. It might work on the brains of the chattering classes, but it rarely washes with the bodies on the dancefloor. The DJ should concentrate on 'finding good tunes to play' rather than 'attracting meaning from the data cloud'.
from the book Last Night a DJ Saved My Life
Postmodernism and Cyberspace
What is cyberspace and how does it relate to the literature, movies, music, art, lifestyles, politics, and sexuality of the postmodern world? The word "cyberspace," coined by the science fiction writer William Gibson in 1984, refers to the virtual world created by communication over the internet. Debates about this new mode of experience swirl around questions of pornography on the internet, hacking, race and gender stereotypes, First Amendment rights, freedom of information, and copyright. Literary scholars argue about how computers will transform research, textual editing, models of reading and writing, and the nature of literature. Novelists and film makers attempt to imagine the future of a wired society, while corporate culture strives to cash in on the World Wide Web. http://www.vanderbilt.edu/AnS/english/Clayton/sch295.htm
Memphis 1981, Memphis, The New International Style provided a stylistic antidote to austere modernism in the first exhibition of the Memphis group in 1981. For them, decoration and styling was a game.
The term “postmodernism” was coined in the 1960s. Initially the concept was created as a reaction to the era preceding it, known – presumably not surprising – as “modernism.” During the second half of the 20th century, intellectuals and artists had become alienated with modernism’s reliance on a utopian, new world order characterized by: the formal, rational, paradigm of scientific inquiry; the existential ideal of responsible action; and the quest for certainty, absolutes, and the “Truth.” --http://hyper.vcsun.org/HyperNews/battias/get/cs327/s02/ird/154.html?nogifs
[...] all our answers are simply constructs, that there is no truth, there are only versions of it. Artists are people who have teetered against the void since they became conscious. Western artists since at least Shakespeare have been trying to juggle the paradox of meaningless existence. When conceptual artists like Marcel Duchamp and John Cage began introducing ordinary life and accident into art, they acknowledged the paradox of the void. The interrupted narrative, the fractured construct, the disorder of everyday life — in art, that's a tip of the hat to the void, to the absence of God, the absence of hierarchy, the absence of order and truth and harmony and hegemony. -- http://www.communityarts.net/readingroom/archive/30hallelujahdet2.php
SHOPPING:
Subculture: The Meaning of Style - Dick Hebdige [Amazon US]
NO CULTURAL STUDIES BOOK has been more widely read than Dick Hebdige's 1979 Subculture: The Meaning of Style, from which this essay is taken. It brought a unique and supple blend of Althusser, Gramsci and semiotics (as propounded by Barthes and the "Prague School") to bear on the world of, or at any rate near to, the young British academics and students who first became immersed in cultural studies. That was the world of "subcultures" more visible in Britain than anywhere else: teds, skinheads, punks, Bowie-ites, hippies, dreads . . .
