Great Artists of the Late 20th and Early 21st Century Term Paper

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women artists," feminists have reflexively responded by trying to find great women artists from the past who were undiscovered or to emphasize little-regarded female artists from past artistic movements dominated by men. However, this can create the impression of feminists being 'desperate' to find examples of female greatness and over-inflating the reputation of relatively minor artists. Other feminist art historians have criticized the notion of what constitutes 'greatness' as overly masculine in quality and tried to create a new, specifically female-centric notions of artistic greatness. Feminist critic Linda Nochlin sees this as problematic given that there is no clear feminine principle uniting women artists through the ages: in fact, women artists and writers are more apt to resemble males of their respective periods than they are of all women throughout the ages.

Instead, Nochlin asserts that the absence of great female artists is similar to the reason why there are no great Eskimo tennis players: women have simply lacked opportunities to develop their greatness, based upon institutional discrimination. The 'woman problem' arises from the fact that it has been easier to gain access to the tools necessary to produce greatness if one is white, middle-class, and male. The very concept of 'greatness' or the tracing of an unbroken line of greatness from Michelangelo to Van Gogh and beyond is "romantic, elitist, and individual-glorifying" (Nochlin 4). This concept of greatness, in other words, is very much the product of our peculiar Western culture and by engaging in the debate feminists are subverting themselves by accepting such concepts uncritically. Art in this narrow modality is conceptualized as innate, predetermined, and ahistorical, despite the fact that in many other cultural contexts art is a communal and a social rather than a personally-generated artistic product. And even in the West, financial and institutional support has had a profound influence in making art come into being.

Nochlin does not deny that male artists may have exhibited singular gifts that may have been legitimately called extraordinary. However, she notes that if the female contemporaries of these male artists had shown similar prowess, they might not have been recognized, nurtured, and supported. Being labeled a genius early in life begets genius while the potential of young women is often ignored. It is also noteworthy that many painters and artists came from families where art was the family 'trade.' They thus had familial support and role models that encouraged them to thrive in the profession while others did not. Nochlin also notes that other categories of persons who are underrepresented in the arts such as the aristocracy do not have the question 'why do they not make great' asked of them: only women must justify their 'right' to make art.

Still, the feminist artists of the 1960s and 1970s felt a clear need to respond to the question of 'what is great female art,' given that despite the legitimate objections raised by critics such as Nochlin, they inevitably felt pressure placed upon them by the hegemonic culture to parse the 'woman question.

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' To create what they considered innately female art they often used the physical representation of their bodies in a way that no man could, making the female genitalia and gynocentric images critical to their works. Their works were less in the 'great artist' tradition discussed by Nochlin and more along the lines of works specifically designed to liberate the artist as a member of an oppressed population from social repression: a good example of this is Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party, a three-dimension banquet for great women of history with place settings to represent their accomplishments that have a distinctly physical, female appearance. The work simultaneously celebrates the 'greatness' of women by elevating women of the past in a manner that would not doubt be criticized by Nochlin but uses highly suggestive images of the female anatomy on the plates to question the celebration of maleness and power.

Q2. How does postmodernism differ from modernism?

Modernism is often called a celebration of rationalism. In contrast to previous eras, modernism emphasized the ability to seek the knowledge of absolute truth. "Two new approaches to knowing became dominant in the modern period. The first was empiricism (knowing through the senses) which gradually evolved into scientific empiricism or modern science with the development of modernist methodology. The second epistemological approach of this period was reason or logic" (Hoffman 1). Superstition was shunned and there was an attempt to create purely functional designs in art and architecture that reduced objects to their purest essences. During the modernist period, as the shift in power moved away from the church, politics (governments, kings, etc.) and universities (scholars, professors) took over as the primary sources of authority" (Hoffman 1). Modernism is often called the age of bureaucracy and standardization.

Postmodernism, in contrast, questioned the ability of people to know things in an absolute and unquestioning fashion. "Postmodernism brought with it a questioning of the previous approaches to knowing. Instead of relying on one approach to knowing, they [postmodernists] advocate for an epistemological pluralism which utilizes multiple ways of knowing. This can include the premodern ways (revelation) and modern ways (science & reason), along with many other ways of knowing such as intuition, relational, and spiritual" (Hoffman 1)......

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