Post-Modernism: A Moral Crisis

Wow, in my efforts not to write too long of a post the other day, I left about half a thought in the below entry.

In my last entry, there's an OK mini-explanation of modernism, post-modernism and a definition I disagree with for Post-post-modernism. I included these explanations because it is important to see how each stage is a result of a Moral crisis when these movements are followed to their logical conclusions.

This isn't to say the individual writers and artists were/are morally flawed because of art coming out of Modernism, the modernists had unbelievably beautiful goals - Truth! Rationality! Ideal Beauty! What seductive aims, hard to resist for anyone. However, unlike before the 1920's and 1930's, many of us (correctly) associate those terms now with horrific atrocities like genocides and holocausts (a natural progression of modernist ideals). The 'perfect' truth is an essentially flawed concept.

I certainly had a major love affair with modernism in my mid-20's, but after discovering its fatal (literally) flaws, I threw myself into post-modernism with a vengeance. I actually think I left a decade long marriage for my wanna be post-modernist ideals.

It was with a great sense of mission and adventure that I decided to try and live as if no one thing had greater value than another thing. The beauty inherent in fracture was at least as alluring as modernism to me (maybe more so because it's so edgy and twisted thinking like this). It's also a fairly interesting way to examine one's faults...

Much of post-modernism has actually been accepted in some capacity. Biologically, mentally, interactively, and certainly in the area of communications, there is no arguing that fracture exists in nature. We are absolutely not the same people we were when we born. Not the same in our brains, our bodies, our souls or our connections with the outside world.

There's a terrifying problem here, however, with all these fractures we are supposed to somehow learn to accept within the post-modern movement.

Have you guessed?

If everything has the same intrinsic value, what the fuck is the Moral path? Truly, that is the question for our time.

In an earlier post, I mentioned that I think it is impossible for a moral artist not to be influenced by the actions of our society, our government, our environment and our general atmospheric soup.

I am seeing the next movement form in front of me - a response to the moral problems of post-modernism. Here it is now alive in PDX, alive the the nation: Reflectionalism.

Art is dead. Long live art.