Truth Under Deconstruction

Still in Kansas City and enjoyed a zany game of Balderdash with Ken’s son and his girlfriend. Ken won this game of bluffing, he ordinarily doesn’t win games. So that must mean he is very good at bluffing. We enjoyed many of the speakers we heard at the conference titled “Truth Under Deconstruction.” I went to academic tracks that focused on the art world and postmodernism. I was relieved to find out that P.M. is so last century, it was self destructive such as the piece entitled “Felt Suit” by Joseph Beuys. It merely was an artist hanging up a suit on a hanger and declaring that as art. After a while it became moth eaten and they had to make 100 copies of the suit.

Another instance of “art” was a bag of garbage that the janitor of a museum mistook as a bag of garbage and promptly removed. So, postmodern art was destined to immediately self-destruct by its very nature of seeking an audience response of anger, shock or disbelief. We had heard this earlier from a friend of ours who is an architect. Buildings are meant to hold up and there are certain rules that have to be obeyed so that the weight of beams do not come crashing down on occupants below some postmodern quirk of “artsy” architecture. One PM theorist was challenged on his blueprint to actually build his edifice and it could not be accomplished without caving in.

Pragmaticism rules the day as does gravity when theories on making postmodern architecture do not work. We saw a photo of a PM art museum in Denver and it looks worse than the one on the University of Minnesota campus in Minneapolis. I didn’t think that could be possible, for I hate the Weisman art museum though I have never been inside it. How can one judge a building by its exterior? Turns out that the “creative” angles inside the Denver museum detract attention and make the placement of art very difficult to view inside. Absurdity mounted upon absurdity.

The one salient point I took away from this conference was that Postmodernism is dead. I say, good riddance! and don’t come back again!!!