to us. With the death of God (!),the World is fragmented, the society is fragmented, the family is fragmented and more over this process of fragmentation has become an ‘on-going’ process. For this in postmodernism we notice breaking of forms, use of montage and collages, and mixing of genres in unexpected manners.
Postmodernism is a collectivity of many ISMs. Just as the Colonial Rulers took gold, silver and many other valuable things from the Colonies, similarly they took putties, stone and brick inscriptions, texts, signs (e.g. It is said that Hitler took the Sacred and invincible sign of the Hindu symbol of Swastika from India and used it as his insignia by distorting it slightly), definitions, meanings and many other cultural ingredients to their country too. Then they changed these things partially, modified and sometimes transformed them according to their own interest which ultimately found expression in Postmodernism.
Again, as postmodern culture is essentially mass-culture, all prevailing canons are discredited. The traditional values are flouted; culture is decolonized. The classic example of this practice is Duchamp’s presentation of Mona Lisa with a goatee. Here art has been carnival zed. The carnivalization is, in a way, reflector of the comic and absurdist ethos of postmodernism.
While modernism gave way to the energies of mass-culture and a decadence for aesthetics of Kitsch, postmodernism insists on the pleasure of the moment(monokronoshedonics) and looked for cheaper aspects of life. The pleasure principle of postmodernism has inevitably led to an endless mixing of genres and modes of aesthetic thinking and conceptual art; film literature, Avant-grade and mass-culture, the tragic and the comic, the sublime