The Three Phases of Culture According to J.J. McCullough

 

J.J. McCullough divides art into three categories, pre-modern, modern, and postmodern, and opines that now, after postmodernism, there is nowhere else to go.

Pre-modernism, he says, is characterized by beauty, craftsmanship, and religious values.

Modernism is defined by rationality and efficiency, rejecting beauty, craftsmanship, and religious values.

Postmodernism is defined by the rejection of rationality and efficiency. “Subverting whatever art is supposed to be.” “Weird for the sake of weird.”

McCullough sees these as the only possibilities; and we have exhausted them. So from now on… he suggests perhaps we will see a mix of them all.

His analysis seems flawed. To begin with, it takes no account of non-Western art. And restricting ourselves to Western art, there is a strange imbalance in his timeline. Pre-modern goes up to the late 19th and early 20th centuries; postmodernism appears in 1917 with Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain.” Leaving perhaps 17 years for modernism. McCullough suggests that postmodernism too is now exhausted and done.

If these really are the three inevitable approaches to art, why is it that only one of them ever occurred to artists in the millennia up to 1900? Why wasn’t art always a mix of them all, as McCullough suggests it should be in the future?

Rather than three approaches to art, it looks as though we have art, then two failed approaches to it. Art is craft plus vision; it means to convey the Good, the True and the Beautiful. Rejecting craftsmanship and religious values means, then, rejecting art.

If, as McCullough says, modernism is about rationality and efficiency, “form follows function,” we have a problem. Art performs no obvious function. Again, this is a rejection of art.

As is postmodernism, as McCullough says, it is “subverting whatever art is supposed to be.” That speaks for itself.

What we have is a collapse of the arts about the beginning of the 20th century, which has since then progressed to the point of nihilism. Not three approaches to art, or even two, but just one. Duchamp’s “postmodern” “Fountain” actually appeared three years before Eliot’s “The Waste-Land,” from which modernism dates in poetry.

The real difference between modernism and postmodernism is simply that modernism lamented the loss of art; postmodernism celebrates it.

Which is why there is now nowhere to go. The last embers of the gallery have been burned down to ash.

It is the suicide of a culture.