Formalism, Postmodernism, Expressionism and Realism. Why is it all art?

After reading the chapter on Formalism, I found a new respect for the genre. Not that I disliked it, I just never thought about it before. And maybe that’s why I like it: it’s art for art’s sake. It allows us to enjoy art without having to think deeply about it’s meaning. It’s as if formalist pieces say, “Just relax, stop thinking so hard about things, and just enjoy me. Now get back you your latte.”

Now that I know about more about formalist art I see it everywhere. The high school down the road from my house has a metallic formalist piece in it’s traffic circle. It’s literally found in nearly every downtown city I’ve ever been in. It doesn’t make any statements, it just adds to the beauty of a public space (or wherever it exists).

Post-modernism is altogether different. The rise of this genre, in hindsight, seems entirely predictable. When a popular genre presents it’s contents in a constrained or predictably packaged format (modernism), there is always someone who want’s to burn it to the ground. Someone who wants to break all the rules they were born into and do (shocking) things to intentionally piss off their parents. They break rules because it’s easy and that’s what they feel should be done. Hence, postmodernism.

I can’t help but think the genre is kind of whiny. It seems to say “hey look at me mom! Mom! Mooooom!!” and when mom doesn’t look the child does something bad and wins her attention. This, of course, is only natural, making the genre a natural course of action given it’s environment. It’s the unpleasant side of human nature that we try to repress, but is just as necessary in understanding the whole.

Compared (or contrasted) with expressionism and realism, formalism and postmodernism have similarities and differences. For example, both formalism and realism seem to make the audience look at the representation before trying to understand the artist. But realism and postmodernist works, unlike formalism, have a meaning or statement behind them, be it political, social, etc. This is different from expressionism, where the work makes a statement about the artist. And formalism stands out from the crowd by attempting to have no meaning behind the artwork at all.

So why is it all art? Each of the large “genres” studied in this book seem to have at least a small overlap with one another. I find the different ways in which humans have showed this world through their art to be incredibly fascinating. And I find the ways in which we’ve attempted to define the different ways we’ve expressed this life to be equally interesting (the genres). What will be the next large form of understanding the world through art?