I am proud that as a near-40 knowledge-worker-type, I share Dylan's sense of total brainless fun.

For me "Modernism" refers to an early twentieth century aesthetic, prevalent in literature, music, painting, and dance and all the other arts really.

The general idea, though, is that a ballet isn't great because of the story it tells. It's great because of the execution of its formal elements: the speed and pacing of the human shapes in concert with each other.

Vermeer isn't great because he's painting the Annunciation; he's great because of the formal composition of the painting (almost every Vermeer is a master lesson in exploiting the Golden Mean). Beethoven's symphonies aren't great because they evoke an heroic age, but because of his mastery of harmony and orchestration and all the other elements of music.

In the 19th century, art was understood to be great because of the seriousness of what it portrayed (like, Life o' Jesus, or Great Historical Battles). It was mimetic in that it referred back to the world and was judged by how well it recreated the world. Art academies turned out very technically proficient artists who rendered things beautifully but had created very dull, lifeless, self-important work.

The great credo in Modern design was "form follows function" and that's close to the core of most iterations of Modernism. A very high mastery of formal elements which are valid because of how they are used instead of what they represent.

This is why, for example, Joyce pushes language so drastically in Ulysses and even more so in Finnegan's Wake. His project is to find out how much language can express and what it can do. Can it articulate the "stream of consciousness," the passing range of thoughts, subjective experience? Yes? Then how about digging deeper into language itself; can it break past sentences and narrative so that the embedded historical meanings of words play off each other? Ummmm, maybe...

These are formal questions. Certainly Joyce caused some hubbub because he wrote about female sexuality (for example) but the bigger project was not the subject matter but formal experimentation. Could he articulate things which had not been expressed before? Could he create new forms instead of working in received ones?

Abstraction in painting flows from the same impulse. Paintings are good or bad because of how they are composed, how color is used. It doesn't need to refer back to the world. It doesn't need to represent.

Modernism dominated most arts during the 20th century. Sometime around the 60s you start to see a different aesthetic (Pop Art being an early example) emerge, which is not concerned primarily with the formal questions of any particular media. These new movements are really too varied to have a coherent aesthetic, so they're mostly defined by what they are not. They are Not Modernism, hence Post-Modern.

The general concern (in my opinion) of Post-Modernism, though, is a re-engagement with the mediated world. Kind of a defiant push back against a media-saturated world, using the same techniques as advertising. There's an inherently political aspect to post-modernism that's very different from the concerns of Modernism. Post-Modernism is not interested in pure forms, but in a fractured contrast of forms.

Modernism is high art; Post-modernism contrasts High and Low. Pop forms, political speak, advertising are bounced off each other, with a healthy dose of distancing irony.

Anyway, that's how I understand it. It's all tied into the 20th Century's Crisis of Epistemology (aka, What is Knowable?) So it's all Wittgenstein's fault, along with a bunch of pesky French thinkers who happily deconstructed all our certainties.

Ok, this modernism/post-modernism, thingy is something I have a very patchy concept of.

What about Dada? The meaninglessness/war/violence of the modern world is their thang. So, Dada=Post Modernism? Or is there more to one or the other to screw me up?

How women from other countries refer to "that time of the month"

I have always loved the Danes. Even moreso now.

I think I get the idea of post-modern, but like Connie, the terms bugs me. It's like "giving 110%".

I think I get the idea of post-modern, but like Connie, the terms bugs me. It's like "giving 110%".

Most of the people I see who use it tend to have this hip, cynical, "I've evolved to a place beyond you plebeian modern folk, therefore I am post-modern" thing going on. I can't separate the term from the sneering hipsters.

If I accept that Modern does not necessarily equal Contemporary, or that modern the adjective is different from Modern the almost-noun, my head gets a bit more limber.

What about Dadaism? The meaninglessness/war/violence of the modern world is their thang. So, Dada=Post Modernism? Or is there more to one or the other to screw me up?

Dadaism is tricky. It's meant to be tricky, I guess. In retrospect it does look more like a precursor to post-modernism. At the time, it was considered the far edge of Modernism.

In a way, Dadaism is like the kid who doesn't show his work in math class. It immediately seizes the implications of Modernism's formal concerns and jumps ahead to say, "Hey, what's so pure about these forms anyway? Why presume these are absolute values? If all bets are off and we're making up new rules from scratch, let's question all the assumptions."

And, as you note, Dadaism was a reaction to the carnage of modern war. It basically wants to challenge the entire dominant cultural model. To explode forms entirely, to break from all previous models of meaning. Because the "meanings" all added up to an insane kind of culture.

So that's some of the same political edge in post-modernism as well: all this adds up to humans being exploited and ground up.

A lot of Dadaists saw a kind of validation when they saw their first tanks painted in camouflage. To their mind, this played like "Cubism Will Kill You."

Pretty dress, Jilli!

Loving the Danish expression, as well.

Ouch. Hec just made me understand abstract art and Dadaism. I think my brain wasn't meant to bend that way.

Most of the people I see who use it tend to have this hip, cynical, "I've evolved to a place beyond you plebeian modern folk, therefore I am post-modern"

Only they call it "po-mo."

Or perhaps the people mocking them do. I'm not sure.