Modern Art

There is much debate over when Moderism began. I believe that the founding moment of modern art was the 1863 Salon des Refuses in Paris, when a selection of the paintings that had been rejected by that year's jury for the official exhibition, or Salon, of a new Ð''establishment' art was allowed an alternative Salon of its own and continues today through postmodernism (beginning with Pop Art).

Developments in modern art overthrew established ideas about what art was, who could make it and what and whom it was for. The common trend was to seek answers to fundamental questions about the nature of art and human experience. In place of a narrow range of the center materials and practices, oil or watercolor; bronze or marble; painting, printing, or sculpting, it enabled artists to make use of whatever means they chose to the purposes of self-expression. Being that the starting point for many of the in the explorations of modernism was a questioning of the materials, conventions, and skills above art practice itself, just what is modernist was not initially clear. Many artists have produced a wide-range of pieces in the last 150 years, since Modernism's inception with Manet's, 1863, Luncheon on the Grass, to address this issue. Ranging from gestures that run from the iconoclastic, such as Picasso's use of newspaper and wallpaper, old tin cans, and other drug to make his collages and sculptures; through the provocative, as in Pollock's abandonment of paintbrushes, oils, and painterly dexterity for the crudeness of household enamel poured straight from the tin; to the blatantly challenging, such as DuChamp's nomination of a urinal, and more recently and exotically, Damien Hirst's nomination of a dead shark as a work of art.

Post -Modernism operated on the same tenants as Modernism. However, where modernism was idealistic, semiotic versus functional, humorous versus straight, eclectic versus purist, ambiguous versus transparent, collaged versus integrated and so on. Charles Jencks suggested, that the postmodernist Era began at 3:32 PM on 15 July 1972, when a typical idealist-functional-simple-purist-humorless (etc.) housing complex in St. Louis, Missouri, was dynamited to make way for something more popular-complex-eclectic-humorous (etc.)." As a movement, postmodernism, not only calls into question the very idea of progress; it's endless recycling of in images and celebration