With respect to the arts, one significant point of confusion arises from the fact that both "modern" and "postmodern" are terms used to describe aesthetic positions as well as historical epochs. Since the word "postmodern" first achieved popular currency some twenty years ago, it has generated confusion and controversy and at the same time enjoyed a fabulous career in academic journals, public lecture series, and trendy restaurant reviews. Clever critics were quick to point out that appending the prefix "post" to the term "modern" was oxymoronic, since the super cession of contemporaneity it implied was well-nigh impossible, if not unimaginable. One claim that postmodernism is an aesthetic position that dismantles the terms of modernism and has precedents throughout the modern period. Clearly, the issue that goes begging here is the definition of modernism (on either historical or aesthetic terms) against which the postmodern is to gain its definitive identity. This basic standpoint of post-modernism leads it to a harsh critique of modernity and especially of the project of the Enlightenment which operates with the notions and categories of the temporal, objective - in one word, "scientific" - worldview. Post-modern thinkers attack the very idea of an "objective world" or "reality." They criticize modernists for basing their vocabularies on transcendent language, and they oppose the use of such terms as "substance," or "use-value."
Historicism has been repeatedly attacked by modernists, avant-gardists, and other "progressive" ideologues. They allege that their historicist colleagues have so little creativity of their own that they must stoop to plundering the art of the past with the intent of seducing the eyes and ears of the public with sights and sounds made venerable--and hence marketable--by virtue of their familiarity. In sum, postmodernism is best understood as marking the site of several related, but not identical ....
