It’s difficult to consider the end of a movement as movements become increasingly pluralistic and resist definition. Modernism may not be over. Artists, architects and others still do work in the spirit of the Modern Movement. Scholars still disagree about what Postmodernism is and when it began, let alone if or when it ended. People still do work based on postmodern theories and ideology, but none of this means Postmodernism is still going on. A movement can be over and still have its practitioners. French Academic painters continued to paint into the early 20th century, and American High Modernists worked into the 1960s and beyond. Nevertheless, it seems that Postmodernism was a finite movement that began in the 1960s and ended in the 1990s. It fell victim to the stock market crash of 1987, the end of the Cold War in 1989, and a burgeoning Hypermodernism that emerged with the technological boom of the 1990s. Today, Hypermodernism reigns supreme, but scholars are struggling to comprehend the change.

To say Postmodernism is over, we must have some conception of what it was. It seems that postmodern attitudes date back to Duchamp’s activities in New York and the Swiss Dada movement during WWI. Ihab Hassan traces the term to Federico Onís in his Antología de la Poesía Española e Hispanoamericana (1882-1932), where Postmodernismo was used to describe a movement in Latin America.¹ While it seems the word did not enter the American art experts’ lexicon before the 1980s, Postmodernism is a convenient umbrella covering an array of theories, ideas, and movements including poststructuralism, Marxism, feminism, multiculturalism, and nihilism. It has meaning in fields as diverse as art, architecture, literature, philosophy, politics, and warfare. It is a finite cultural phenomenon that apparently began in the US in the 1960s as a backlash against social changes that coincided with corporate and government appropriation of American High Modernism during the 1950s.

Postmodernism is marked by the perceived failure of Modernism and a loss of hope in the face of social and political trials such as the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Kennedy assassination, race riots in Watts, the Vietnam War, etc. The architect Robert Venturi first articulated tenets of Postmodernism in his in his book, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966). Mies van der Rohe claimed, "Less is more." Venturi retorted, "Less is a bore"² Venturi prescribed a recombination of old clichés to "ironically express in this indirect way a true concern for society’s scale of values."³ It is a prescription that Arthur Danto repeats two decades later in his book, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (1997).⁴

The emphasis on irony stems from the cynical acknowledgment that neither art nor architecture could deliver Utopia. It is also a response to the somber, serious nature of Modern art, especially American Modern art after WWII. This emphasis on humor is, perhaps, the defining characteristic of postmodern art, but not the only characteristic. Postmodernism is politically and aesthetically pluralistic and subversive. Attacking the authoritarian proclamations of Clement Greenberg, Postmodernists have sought to expand the definition of what constitutes a work of art and to eliminate the Modernists’ artificial divide between high art and mass culture.

We can easily trace this to the work of artists such as James Rosenquist, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, and Jeff Koons. Rosenquist used airbrush to paint images from popular culture as massive murals, producing works such as President Elect (1960-1) and F-111 (1965). Roy Lichtenstein transformed the images found in newspaper cartoons into large paintings, including In the Car (1963) and Whaam (1963). Andy Warhol famously built Brillo Box (1964), blurring the lines between art and commercial products. This also this changed a young philosopher named Arthur Danto, causing him to become an art critic and a leading voice for the postmodern artist. More recently, Jeff Koons encased vacuum cleaners in Plexiglas for works such as New Shelton Wet/Dry Tripledecker (1981) to make an ironic statement about the similarities between museum and department store displays.⁵

It seems that Postmodernism has run its course. The end began with the stock market crash in 1987. That event transformed the art world, changing the way the art world treated itself. Through the 1980s, the art market boomed, creating a lucrative environment for artists and gallery dealers. Leading art magazines featured pointed criticism by acknowledged experts such as Rosalind Krauss and Hal Foster. Their criticism was based on critical theory, especially the work of Barthes, Derrida, and Foucault. To participate in the art world before the crash, one had to understand the intellectual aspects of art. After the crash, attitudes changed. The recession that followed crushed the art market. With money removed from the equation, artists were free to experiment more, to do whatever they wanted. Rampant pluralism erased remaining notions of movements or prescribed styles, eliminating the need to be ironic. As the art market recovered, collectors no longer cared about the intellectual underpinnings of the art. They wanted reassurance that they were spending money on good work, that the art they bought would have good resale value. Critics responded with a new sort of criticism. It was rich with biographical highlights and physical descriptions of the work but devoid of critical theory or harsh judgments about the work. This can still be seen in art magazines and newspaper reviews today.

Even without these events, it seems likely Postmodernism would have come to an end. Eventually, the ironic little joke grows old, and people become serious again. This can be seen in the works such as Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial (1982), Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin (1989-96), and Santiago Calatrava’s TVG Railway Station in Lyon (1989-92).⁶ Besides, the Postmodernists accomplished their goals. We have come to accept that there is no certain way a work of art has to be, and the divide between high art and mass culture has disappeared. The proof is in the museums and galleries. Everything that could be displayed has been displayed. Koons relied on irony and the museum effect to give his vacuum cleaners importance. That is, anything presented in the museum as art becomes important by virtue of being in the museum.⁷ One can argue that the vacuums were interesting and maybe even beautiful in their time, but Thomas Krens, director of the Guggenheim museum, went one better. In 1998, he mounted the Art of the Motorcycle exhibition. He bypassed artists and replaced the art objects with commercial products. The exhibition was covered in all the major art magazines and set attendance records for the museum.

As it is, events conspired to make Postmodernism obsolete. The Cold War unexpectedly ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. This brought a wave of optimism. It seemed that Western Capitalism had finally triumphed over Communism, even if the economy did not immediately improve. President Bush (the elder) invaded Iraq to free Kuwait in the 1991 Gulf War. The war was noteworthy for its brevity and for the extensive use of smart weapons. It was a war for the Nintendo generation, with hour upon hour of video footage showing bombs and missiles riding laser designators to their targets. Bush won the battle but still lost his 1992 bid for re-election to Bill Clinton. This heralded the 1990s tech boom, increasing globalization with the popular rise of the internet and a bold expansion of corporate capitalism into the art world. All of this paved the way for the Art of the Motorcycle exhibition and spelled the end for Postmodernism in the visual arts.

This is not to say contemporary artists have escaped the influence of postmodern thinkers. Postmodernists have their fingerprints all over the contemporary academy. It seems that one cannot earn an art degree today without learning something about Marxism, Poststructuralism, and critical theory. One cannot escape without learning about Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, and their crusade against Sartrean Existentialism. Deconstruction is part of our lexicon, even if many people have no idea what the term means or how to apply the strategy. But artists emerging from the Academy today are much like those emerging in the 1960s. We have heard the rhetoric, but interpret it in a different way, intent on making our own mark in the world. We see postmodern artists as the Old Guard and we have a choice: Follow them or do something else. The bold among us choose the latter.

The question is, where are we now? What is the state of contemporary art today? I maintain that a new phenomenon has emerged. It is based on an expanding and fragmenting art world, a movement thrust forward by an increasing rate of technological change. For lack of a better name, I will use a term that Nick Prior uses in his article, Having One’s Tate and Eating It: Transformations of the Museum in a Hypermodern Era. (2003) We are now in a period of Hypermodernism with respect to technology, philosophy and social structure, and this has a direct and growing influence on the art world.

Technologically, advances in microchips and broadband connections to the internet changed everything. The Postmodernists relied on color television as a supplier of entertainment and images, but color television pales in comparison to the capacity of the computer. As Perry Anderson wrote in The Origins of Postmodernity (1998), "The machine pours out a torrent of images with whose volume no art can compete."⁸ If color television was the dominant technology of the recent past, the computer dominates the present. The computer is far more seductive than TV because the computer is a gateway for active participation. The internet places a world of resources at our fingertips, and the computer runs software that allows us to write papers, prepare presentations, play games, shop, send messages to other people, create digital artwork, and see what other artists are doing all over the world.

Philosophically, Postmodernists relied heavily on the work of Barthes, Derrida and Foucault, among others. Although their work still holds sway in academia, the leading voice for the present is Jean Baudrillard. His notions of simulacrum, simulation and hyperreality, his perceptions of technology and the media perfectly describe the conditions in our world. This is seen in Baudrillard’s conception of binary opposites compared to the conceptions of Derrida and Andreas Huyssen. For Derrida, one opposite was preferred over another. Good was preferred over evil, male over female, etc. Huyssen prescribed the acceptance of binary opposites as equals in a state of tension. For Huyssen, this tension was the core of postmodernity. But for Baudrillard, one pole is always stretched to an unnatural extreme. He frequently supplies beauty and ugliness as an example, where beauty pulled to the extreme becomes fashion and ugliness becomes the monstrous. This fits his notion of hyperreality, the "more real than real." As he sees it, when beauty consumes all the energy of both beauty and ugliness, when one has more beauty than beauty, this is fashion.⁹ It is more beauty than is possible in nature. Of course, with plastic surgery, contemporary diet products, and weight machines, people can reshape themselves as never before. With photo manipulation, we can create images that look convincing but have no bearing on reality. This is one aspect of the hyperreal in our society.

Baudrillard’s notions extend to the media and our entire culture. As he sees it, we are all seduced by the hyperreality of the media. Between television, the internet, and other media, we are constantly bombarded with an overwhelming profusion of images resulting in a sort of unreality. It is as if our lives are not real lives, but simulations of life, like playing a video game in real time. The entire world becomes a simulacrum, a hyperreal simulation of the real. Life becomes a dream from which we can never wake. We wonder about the reality of events that unfold in real time, such as the collapse of the World Trade Center. Seen through the filter of television and other media sources, the event plays like a movie with good special effects. It does not seem real. It seems as if the most current event has already happened. People are no longer even people but terminals in a vast net of information.¹⁰ This sounds ridiculous until one considers people walking around with iPod buds in their ears and cellphones with both full video capability and high-speed internet access in their hands.

Structurally, this evolution of philosophy and technology has converged with changes in the social landscape to transform the art world. This is most evident in museums, where the environment changed from a ritual space with the behavioral expectations of a library to the equivalent of an amusement park. Changes in expectations, management style, and function produced the hypermodern museum. Expectations changed in 1963 with the exhibition of the Mona Lisa at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. The exhibition reportedly drew over a million visitors in one month, becoming the first blockbuster.¹¹ The success of this show caused a change in management style. Museum directors mounted bigger, more ambitious exhibitions that required ever more resources, and museums turned to corporations and the government for support. Consequently, corporate officers began to replace financial magnates on the boards of major museums. The magnates, so-called robber barons, supported museums as a philanthropic gesture. Corporations support museums for public relations benefits and monetary gain.¹²

All of this changed the museum’s function. Under the robber barons, people visited art museums to study and contemplate the works of art. The artworks themselves were frequently presented as holy relics mounted on white walls or packaged in Plexiglas cases and contextually isolated. Institutions such as the Art Institute in Chicago and the Museum of Modern Art in New York supply fine examples. In the Age of the Blockbuster, art museums increasingly rely on a Culture of Spectacle to bring visitors. As Emma Barker describes it in Contemporary Cultures of Display (1999), spectacle is a "form of domination… that dazzles and deceives, seducing or stunning the spectator into submission."¹³ The emphasis on spectacle may be best exemplified in the architecture of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao. The entire structure is encased in curvilinear forms and coated with reflective metal. It is extravagant and seductive, but the art museum is also expected to do far more now than in the past. As Prior states, "Scholars can study, hedonistic tourists can ’do’ the blockbuster exhibitions at speed, informed collectors can regularly tackle the intricacies of the permanent collection, and computer-literate schoolchildren can scan the museum’s objects from their desktops."¹⁴ The museum is a multi-faceted center for entertainment akin to an amusement park.

With some extrapolation, all this indicates the state of contemporary art today. Museums are still important institutions in the art world. Artists want to show in museums, and museums can still help make art stars. So, if art museums have become hypermodern institutions, the art world is probably also in the grasp of Hypermodernity. It is a time when artists must become increasingly technologically savvy in order to compete and survive. No longer can artists simply shoot slides and send them to galleries. Artists must understand digital technology and use it to market themselves. Artists must have web sites and be prepared to entertain viewers. Artists need not compete with mass culture because high art and mass culture are one and the same.

There will always be a few socially connected artists like Chloe Piene who become stars because they took a sculpture class with Judy Pfaff, got internships with Kiki Smith and Matthew Barney, went to Goldsmith’s in London to earn an MFA and showed a series of drawings at a Whitney Biennial. It does not matter that the drawings were small studies of people masturbating. They sold for thousands of dollars and put her on the map.¹⁵ Few artists can compete with that sort of social positioning, but few need even try. As I type these words, the art world is changing, becoming more global. Capital from Russia and China are influencing the art market. I question how much longer New York can lay claim to its lofty status as capital of the art world, but the answer does not matter. The contemporary art world is pluralistic, technologically oriented, and based on a culture of spectacle.

Hypermodern artists enjoy the fruits of both Modernism and Postmodernism. A hypermodern artist knows that all work made as art is art. It is no longer required to be against something, to be subversive. One can be for something, spreading a message. It is no longer required to be any particular way. One can be abstract, figurative, narrative, funny, serious, expressive, photorealistic, illustrative, conceptual or whatever without fear. It is no longer required to use specific materials or media. One can use all media, all forms, seemingly without limits or boundaries. The hypermodern artist understands that form and concept both contribute to smart, seductive art. A hypermodern artist can leverage technology to make art, market work, and find an audience. That audience may be found through traditional galleries, mass media, and the internet. The hypermodern artist learns lessons from contemporary museums. Message is irrelevant if no one sees the work. People will only flock to the work if it is presented in a way that captures the viewers’ imagination. Postmodernists still exist, but Postmodernism had its day. Postmodernism’s effects are irrefutable, but it is far better to be a hypermodern artist.