ABSTRACT
Things grow strange at the bitter end of Modernism, past Postmodernism, when people see the elevation of individual viewpoints no longer offered as individual, but instead, each offered as the ultimate abstraction. Modernism takes a deep dive into the self, by erasing the line between the creator and the world: the work is presented by the creator now standing invisible behind it, but the assumption is still that hoi polloi will work to understand it. Indeed, the claim of Modernist theory is that this is necessary to understanding the world. The problem with the necessarily abstract, necessarily complex Modernist artwork that offered an alternative to the world itself was that it took so much work to enter—for most people, too much work. One facet of academic Postmodernism was the rejection of the Enlightenment structures (rationality, debate, democracy) if they conflicted with personal sensibility.
