THE NOTION OF POSTMODERNISM was once a great stimulant to art and thought; today, it feels like another anti-aphrodisiac of the just past. In some ways, postmodernism seems more historical than modernism, reanimated as modernism is by questions of colonialism, diaspora, and globality. On the other hand, this untimeliness makes the present a good moment to look back at postmodernism, if only to measure our distance from it.The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, which I edited, was published forty years ago; it was quickly followed by Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation (
This article will be released in full online June 5, 2023. In popular thought, the youth and student movements of France May 1968 have been linked with the…