Back in the olden days of yore, when velociraptors roamed the fields and men apparently wore leaves and rode said velociraptors like horses (at least, according to the creation museum, and who am I to deny their socially constructed view of reality by foisting my Eurocentric “objectivity” upon them?), cave men would grunt, and hit giant monoliths with sticks, and even engage in artistic pursuits like painting other cave men grunting, or drawing cave men hitting giant monoliths with sticks, or depicting cave men painting other cave men, sometimes in an infinite regress. Back then, art was meant to be a reflection of reality. Even though their feeble, monkey-hands could not properly wield a paintbrush, and indeed their paintbrush was probably a crusty twig, they still managed to represent creatures that sort of resembled gazelle impaled with spears and such. And in the face of all this, the cave women did not grunt angrily about some cave patriarchy oppressing them, only to smear the cave paintings with their vaginal blood to reclaim their femininity, nor did elitist French cave men come along and decry the work as simplistic and in the process of deconstructing itself, destroying all objective reality along with it, in some kind of raging vortex of postmodernism.

Even as recently as a hundred years ago, the classic works of fiction had coherent plots, the paintings were not randomly splattered with paint (much less feces), and the sculptures almost never resembled incomprehensible tendrils emanating from some abstraction of pure being; in fact, the sculptures usually just looked like dudes with tiny penises. Don’t confuse those tiny penises with some abstract tendril.

Then something happened in the past century that changed art. Artists sort of went apeshit. James Joyce made novels full of jibberish and vague allusions to Greek myths. Picasso painted portraits of people made out of squares and seemingly smashed into two-dimensions.  And in the culmination of this general trend toward absurdity, John Cage composed the famed classical song 4′ 33″ (no need to download it if you’ve never heard it, folks; just turn off anything making noise and sit there for four minutes and thirty three seconds, reflecting piously on the silence, and then you’ve heard it—not the official version, by all means, but only a bootleg version that hopefully won’t provoke the copyright holders into suing). Someone had thrown a wrench into the art machine.

It is understandable that artists began to revolt in what is now called the “modern” period. During this time period we started seeing strange, inconceivable things happen, like black people voting, women getting jobs and divorces, and worst of all, normal people began publishing their own work, writing their own songs, and creating their own art. Resources and technology were soon available for all to create works of art that had previously been limited to genteel elitist classes who had the free time to do so. Art was no longer a luxury for bored aristocrats. Now any idiot off the street had free time and didn’t spend every waking hour in a factory making a shoe. Even the black people and women were starting to make art! Something had to be done!

The natural tendency in situations like this is to simply change the rules. The ascent of modernism was little more than the elitist, artistic equivalent of schoolyard boys proclaiming in the middle of a game that the rules have suddenly and arbitrarily changed, and that no more “Givsie-Taksies” are allowed.  This effectively prevented the common folk from raining on the elitist art parade.  Art was no longer about expressing beauty, depicting reality, and so on. It became an incomprehensible puzzle, an intellectualized crossword puzzle of sorts. The finest aspect of art became its ability to concentrate as many classical allusions or as much Freudian psychology as possible into any particular medium. This is when we saw stream of consciousness sweep through literary works, the emergence of poetry like Eliot’s “The Wasteland” and its endless references to classic works, the appearance of abstraction in sculpture and painting, and the composition of riot-inducing, jackhammering classical works like Stravinski’s “The Rites of Spring.”

But although the original modernist agenda was likely a conservative response to make art more “intellectualized” (and therefore more difficult to be duplicated by the unwashed masses), it soon became hijacked by the liberal agenda.  At that point it became twisted and mutated into the deformed mongrel we call “postmodernism,” and that’s when the deliberate elitism seemed to become derailed in favor of pretentious, faux-elitism that could be achieved by anyone ruminating on anything, be it vaginal blood or feces. “Art” became subjective, and indeed anything could be art, whether it was a teacup made by a mexican migrant worker or a piece of string laying on the floor. Those modernists who tried to reclaim and “intellectualize” art found their intellectualization stolen from them and stripped naked, and their philosophy twisted and taken to extremes while a weird, French, skeptical epistemology ripped through it like a trailer-park tornado. This is when we began to see artists who fancied their shit stained portraits deep commentaries on the arbitrary divisions of art and the social construction of normative heterosexist values. The modernists tried to change art by infusing it with elitism and intellectualism, to reclaim it from the masses, and this provoked the chain reaction of art’s continual, rapid evolution, and the ultimate realization that art could be redefined any which way, prompting theories of meaning that denied objectivity, that denied “art” had to be one particular thing, and which focused upon the art of art-making, or meta-art, rather than art itself.

I myself am sympathetic to some postmodernism. It treats art as a game of sorts, and it is certainly playful; it is like trying to put together a puzzle with random objects that aren’t even puzzle pieces, and reveling in the absurdity of it all. It is amusing because it is a narcissistic sort of art that turns the viewer into the artist, the creator of meaning and value, and hence it is great for soulless, histrionic men like myself. But I also like modern art. Not just because I’m a member of the eurocentric patriarchy and rape baby seals. My raping of baby seals has no bearing on my love of the moderns; and besides, those baby seals deserved it for wearing such revealing clothing. I like modernism because it possesses the intellectualism of postmodernism in a form that hasn’t been diluted into banal epistemic nihilism or a faux chanelling of outrage toward everything that can be potentially interpreted as some sort of power-structure, which also persistently refuses to see anything but power-structures (from the power-structure of the patriarchy to the hegemony of the ice cream industry) that are oppressing one’s favorite minority group, be it women, African Americans, African American women, African American women with no legs, African American women with no legs who suffer from a terrible lisp, who have slight hearing difficulties, and who find the odor of cheese quite unpleasant, or midgets. The classics, of course, have their own simple beauty, and one of the great contributions of the postmodern turn was to show narcissistic bastards like myself that it is possible to interpret the classics any which way I please, which allows me to see any work of art as an ode to boobs (but which unfortunately cements my status as an insufferable patriarch). And for that reason I cherish the moderns but vaguely value the ability to bullshit that I learned from the postmodern turn.  I suppose I just like the gooey center between the two extremes.