3.How has the concept of ??objectivity?? affected many aspects of 20th century a

Question:

3.How has the concept of ??objectivity?? affected many aspects of 20th century art?

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker:

Irregularly, and usually not at all.

20th century arts fall into two general periods:

1) the 'modernist' style prior to world war II
2) the postmodernist style that slowly supplanted it in the latter half.

Neither period was noteworthy for a consistent, universal style.

Modernism was a time of fashion; different fashions in the arts sprang up, were practiced by a limited number of artists (and also advocated in scholarly treatises by them), and then were discarded (often by the same artists who innovated them) for different fashions: realism, impressionism, expressionism, formalism, pointillism, absurdism, dadaism, art deco, art nouveau, serialism, ethnic nationalism, futurism, fauvism, die blau reiter, new brutalism, the bauhaus style, theatre of cruelty, etc. etc. etc.

In modernist times, the movement that proved most durable was realism (more so in drama and theatrical performance, least of all in music, only fleetingly in the visual arts--and most of the realist movement there happened in the mid-1900s). Objectivity obviously has a lot to do with realism; one must look objectively at the real world to depict it in the art medium. This approach sometimes led to controversy, as in the early questions about the artistic value of realist 'method' actors who might mumble their lines incoherently if a character would do so in real life.

Postmodernism was a period where individual artists each tried to develop a unique and distinctive style, and then to build a career on variations thereof. Moreover, artists quit trying to advocate their theories of art--they'd more often say "my work speaks for itself". If objectivism enters, it's up to the individual artist, and each will approach it differently.

Two broad trends in the postmodern era were 'process' art and 'material' art. In 'process' art, the artist sets up a process and lets it go without conscious control--the work that develops is thus random and any personal expression is almost accidental: Jackson Pollock's paintings made by dripping paint at random on big canvases, John Cage's music composed by tossing coins to choose pitch and duration, to a lesser extent Beckett's automatic writing. 'Material' art simply celebrates the stuff that the art is made of--unadorned--such as Donald Judd's minimalist sculptures or Terry Riley's electronic music. Neither of these trends is particularly concerned with objective reality--to find that in postmodernism, you'd need to come down on individual artists, rather than general trends.