Affinity Aesthetics

In this essay on Jennifer Bornstein, Rachel Baum looks at what happens after the eclipse of postmodernism as an historical category of melancholic retrospection… After the eclipse of postmodernism as an historical category of melancholic retrospection, models of artistic performance and reception shifted. The vestigial ideologies of modernism, including hierarchies of medium and prescriptions for critical practice based on superceding everything from the author to painting, are no longer relevant to today’s emerging artists. The indoctrination in turn-of-the-last-century avant-gardism that many contemporary artists informed by theory have received is no longer serving as a template to their practice, but rather seems like an outdated map of nostalgic ideals and unworkable limitations.