... definition Dominic Striniti, cited in McGuigan (1999), identifies five defining characteristics of postmodern culture which include the breakdown of the distinction between culture and society; an emphasis on style at the expense of substance and content; the breakdown of distinction between high culture and popular culture; confusions over space and time and the decline of 'metanarratives'. Such characteristics can be found amongst contemporary art and some certainly seem to support the previous definitions of postmodern. However, the central problem in defining postmodernism is that it is widely considered to be a theory which promotes the replacement of rules with ideas and that no one school of thought should be dominant. Therefore, an attempt to define it or apply its rules to a cultural object is fundamentally contradictory. It is possible to summarize postmodernism, with reference to contemporary art, as a convergence of styles, past and present including the use of ...

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