Tonic Moment: Search captures the West at a loss for identity and meaning.

Puzzled over the academic controversy as to whether "postmodern art" is useful or misleading as a descriptive term? On one hand, "postmodern art" has been used to describe a rejection of 20th century rationalism--"in essence, a return to the metaphor of the body rather than that of the machine; the return of a belief in and tolerance of the irrationality of human beings." On the other hand and in a broader sociocultural context, the term "postmodern art" has been politically challenged on the grounds that "modern" could hardly be prefixed by "post-" (which means "after") until the democratic ideals underpinning modernism have been fully realized. If you feel yourself in need of a quick political refresher, think and Google: Goya, The Shootings of May 3, 1808. Here we have Goya's nonpartisan reflection on the horror of war while the world shifts from monarchies to modern republics with Napoleon to make it gel politically. "Postmodern art" carries the connotation of stylistic indulgence by affluent and intellectual classes in this political critique of the term.

For the reader determined to delve further into the controversy over "postmodern art," read on. In art theory, the descriptive value of "postmodern art" depends yet on whether modernism is conceived as being constituted of one or two fundamental pieces. Generally motivated by a need for honesty--to free art from aping the world of appearances with a language of its own--modernism developed from Goya through Manet and Cézanne. Modernism then bifurcated into two parallel trajectories: one, the reduction of art to its various essences like Mondrian's elemental grids, Rothko's color effusions, Pollock's action drips; two, the critical anti-art trajectory launched by Duchamp. In the first case, strictly conceived as a progressive reduction of art to the blank canvas or empty gallery, modernism reached its conclusion, and its idealistic attempt at formal purity gave way to postmodern art. In the second case, whenever modernism is understood as a pluralistic entity that has not exhausted the possibilities launched by Duchamp, the term "postmodern art" is still premature.

Romanticism had emphasized the artist as the subject of art before modernism's focus on the self-referential aspects of the art object as the subject of art. Today, the self-conscious exploration of our communicative mediums of interaction constitutes the new frontier of art. Thus for lack of a better term, "postmodern art" has found currency in common parlance because it points to the profound difference between one complete phase of modernism and contemporary art trends that do not subscribe to modernism's failed idealism of formal purity.