Even Cathy Berberian knows...she can't sing

[Joseph Tracy]

On Sep 11, 2010, at 7:35 PM, Jude Bloom wrote:

> Don't words mean, in the end, what people use them to mean?
Isn't the problem with the discrepancy between what people use them   
to mean,  and what people understand them to mean?

> Whatever the integrity or non of its roots, doesn't postmodern mean  
> something that people have by and large agreed upon?
I actually think it is a relatively thin segment of the population  
that is confident as to what this means.
>  Maybe people should or shouldn't use them sparingly and in precise  
> original meaning -- I dunno -- but they sure don't. Any  
> musicologist, art historian, philosopher, etc etc has a broad idea  
> of what someone means when they say "modern" and "postmodern." They  
> may think the terms are dumb, mis-used, and mis-named, but they  
> still get it. So unless I'm missing something -- and please be  
> gentle, I'm sensitive, modern in fact doesn't mean contemporary,  
> even if it should. It means, very broadly, the shit that was going  
> on in the late 1800s and early to mid 1900s.
  The  coining of the term 'postmodern' first appeared in the 1870's.

The following paragraph is from MOMA's website about the history of  
the museum:

In the late 1920s, three progressive and influential patrons of the  
arts, Miss Lillie P. Bliss, Mrs. Cornelius J. Sullivan, and Mrs. John  
D. Rockefeller, Jr., perceived a need to challenge the conservative  
policies of traditional museums and to establish an institution  
devoted exclusively to modern art. When The Museum of Modern Art was  
founded in 1929, its founding Director, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., intended  
the Museum to be dedicated to helping people understand and enjoy the  
visual arts of our time, and that it might provide New York with "the  
greatest museum of modern art in the world."

  People kept using modern as meaning contemporary right into the  
60's when the word was still very popular. It began to be replaced by  
specific "movements" like Pop. Minimal, Abstract Expressionist and  
the generic term  contemporary  in the 70's. The distinctions were  
made and insisted on by academia, historians and art critics, not by  
genuine popular linguistic pressure.

No doubt such periodization, condensation and specificity is very  
useful within a field of knowledge.  My problem is not with the  
usefulness of such terms in advanced criticism or  discussion, but  
with those all too frequent instances when the mystique of a term is  
substituted for sound thought development  in clear accessible English.

  Another problem with these terms is that they take a word with  
practical usage having nothing to do with historic periods and  
effectively disable that ordinary use.  Will the postmodern period  
have an end?  How will we know it is over? Won't we always be in a  
period after modernism , like forever and ever and then some?


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> On Sat, Sep 11, 2010 at 11:33 AM, Ian Livingston  
> <igrlivingston at gmail.com> wrote:
> Yes, David, I know where the terms come from. In fact, the term
> "Modern" (modernus) goes back to the 5th century of the current era.
> Anyway, using it to describe the current period in philosophy, science
> and the arts has merit, so long as it is, as Joseph suggests used with
> a modicum of grace. My point, which is already old and trite so I'll
> shut up on it after this, is that "Postmodernism" cannot exist,
> because the word itself refers to something that has not yet happened,
> something after the current time, which is modern. No style of
> architecture, no literary or philosophical trends, and no scientific
> investigative procedures fit the category. There just is no such
> thing. Pynchon is a contemporary writer, not a future one. Unless he's
> really one of his own characters from AtD, in which case I suppose he
> is plagiarizing works he is going to write when he actually exists at
> some period in the future.
>
> Please understand I say all this with a wry grin and wonder why I'm
> not posting on V. as I want to be doing, but I only have these few
> moments each morning to say anything at all. Perhaps it's just an
> expression of my own frustration with modern pressures.