Imitation and creation

Peter Murphy

pp. 365-380

in: Christine Magerski, Robert Savage, Christiane Weller (eds), Moderne begreifen, Wiesbaden, Deutscher Universitätsverlag, 2007

Abstract

If any modern-era art movement was overrated, it was postmodernism. David Roberts' landmark book Art and Enlightenment (1991) was written at the height of the postmodern sensation. In the book Roberts dissects postmodernism's self-understanding in an unsentimental way. He was not a hostile critic, and certainly not a modernist die-hard. He knew full well that high modernism had run its course, and that exhausted art movements (no matter how great they may once have been) can not be resuscitated. Yet he recognized that postmodernism's claims to aesthetic merit were tenuous and self-refuting.