At a dinner awhile back, I was trying to provoke a reaction from an artist and author by asking if she considered her recent work as “postmodern.” The reaction was immediate and visceral, with several people wincing. “I hate that word,” said a friend attending art school. “It sounds so art school-y.”
Like the alternative category label for music, postmodern is a clumsy and imprecise word. By the very structure of their usage, they connote some sort of overall “accepted” form of the described art form that alternative or postmodern works are deviating from. The labels immediately dilute the importance or originality of a work, dismissing it categorically as derivative, or worse, reactionary.
That being said, we need labels and categories to make life easier, even crude and inaccurate ones. I’m not exactly sure if the following buildings should be considered postmodern, post-postmodern, neomodern, or some other form. The intention of this post isn’t to make an argument for inclusion into a specific category; it’s to point out some obvious and interesting similarities in Minneapolis’ starchitect collection.
