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Neo-Dada

Neo-Dada is a label applied primarily to the visual arts describing artwork that has similarities in method or intent to earlier Dada artwork. Neo-Dada is exemplified by its use of modern materials, popular imagery, and absurdist contrast. It also patently denies traditional concepts of aesthetics.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-Dada

Irony

Irony is a form of expression in which an implicit meaning is concealed or contradicted by the explicit meaning of the expression. Irony involves the perception that things are not what they are said to be or what they seem. Dramatic irony lies in the audience's deeper perceptions of a coming fate, which contrast with a character's ignorance.

Irony is a matter of a perceived disconnection between words and real attitude or values of the speaker, rather than a difference between the denotative meanings of the words a speaker uses; the presence of ten thousand sporks, when all one requires is a knife.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony

Pastiche

n much current usage, the term denotes a literary technique employing a generally light-hearted tongue-in-cheek imitation of another's style; although jocular, it is usually respectful (as opposed to parody, which is not).

Quentin Tarantino uses pastiche often, as his movies are rarely original works of art; they are copied from sources such as pulp novels, blaxploitation, and Chinese kung fu films. The same definition applies to Hideo Kojima also.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pastiche

Decoupage

Decoupage is a type of collage usually defined as a craft. It is the process of placing a picture onto an object for decoration. Often decoupage causes the picture to appear to have depth and looks as though it had been painted on the object.

The process is to glue (or otherwise affix) a picture to an object, then adding more copies of the picture on top, progressively cutting out more and more of the background, giving the illusion of depth in the picture. The picture is often coated with varnish or some other sealant for protection.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collage

Eclecticism in art

Eclecticism is a kind of mixed style in the fine arts, in which features are borrowed from various sources and styles. Significantly, Eclecticism hardly ever constituted a specific style in art: it is characterized by the fact that it was not a particular style. In general, the term describes the combination in a single work of a variety of influences — mainly of elements from different historical styles in architecture, painting, and the graphic and decorative arts.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eclecticism_in_art

Modernism

The Modernist Movement emerged in the mid-19th century in France and was rooted in the idea that "traditional" forms of art, literature, social organization and daily life had become outdated, and that it was therefore essential to sweep them aside and reinvent culture. Modernism encouraged the idea of re-examination of every aspect of existence, from commerce to philosophy, with the goal of finding that which was "holding back" progress, and replacing it with new, and therefore better, ways of reaching the same end. In essence, the Modern Movement argued that the new realities of the 20th century were permanent and imminent, and that people should adapt their world view to accept that what was new was also good and beautiful.

Many modernists believed that by rejecting tradition they could discover radically new ways of making art. Arnold Schoenberg believed that by ignoring traditional tonal harmony, the hierarchical system of organizing works of music which had guided music making for at least a century and a half, and perhaps longer, he had discovered a wholly new way of organizing sound, based in the use of twelve-note rows (See Twelve-tone technique). This led to what is known as serial music by the post-war period. Abstract artists, taking as their examples the Impressionists, as well as Paul Cézanne and Edvard Munch, began with the assumption that color and shape formed the essential characteristics of art, not the depiction of the natural world. Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, and Kazimir Malevich all believed in redefining art as the arrangement of pure colour. The use of photography, which had rendered much of the representational function of visual art obsolete, strongly affected this particular aspect of modernism. However, these artists also believed that by rejecting the depiction of material objects they helped art move from a materialist to a spiritualist phase of development.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernism

Recursionism

Recursionism in art is the use of repeating patterns in modern art (as in the works of M.C. Escher and Salvador Dalí), as also self-similarity in rock art in the old world and on American Indian pottery. Many writers have also explored these ideas in works of fiction, most notably John Barth and David Foster Wallace.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recursionism

Moral relativism

In philosophy, moral relativism is the position that moral or ethical propositions do not reflect absolute and universal moral truths but instead are relative to social, cultural, historical or personal references, and that there is no single standard by which to assess an ethical proposition's truth. Relativistic positions often see moral values as applicable only within certain cultural boundaries or the context of individual preferences. An extreme relativist position might suggest that it is meaningless for the moral or ethical judgments or acts of one person or group to be judged by another, though most relativists propound a more limited version of the theory.

Some moral relativists—for example, the existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre—hold that a personal and subjective moral core lies or ought to lie at the foundation of individuals' moral acts. In this view, public morality is a reflection of social convention, and only personal, subjective morality is truly authentic.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_relativism

Dadaism

Dada or Dadaism is a cultural movement that began in neutral Zürich, Switzerland during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1920. The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature (mainly poetry), theatre, and graphic design, and was characterized by nihilism, deliberate irrationality, disillusionment, cynicism, chance, and the rejection of the prevailing standards in art and randomness.

According to its proponents, Dada was not art—it was anti-art. For everything that art stood for, Dada was to represent the opposite. Where art was concerned with aesthetics, Dada ignored aesthetics. If art were to have at least an implicit or latent message, Dada strove to have no meaning — interpretation of Dada is dependent entirely on the viewer. If art is to appeal to sensibilities, Dada is to offend. It is perhaps then ironic that Dada became an influential movement in modern art. Dada became a commentary on art and the world and thus became art itself.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dada

Causality

The philosophical concept of causality or causation refers to the set of all particular "causal" or "cause-and-effect" relations. A neutral definition is notoriously hard to provide since every aspect of causation has received substantial debate. Most generally, causation is a relationship that holds between events, objects, variables, or states of affairs. It is usually presumed that the cause chronologically precedes the effect. Finally, the existence of a causal relationship generally suggests that - all other things being equal - if the cause occurs the effect will as well (or at least the probability of the effect occurring will increase).

Nihilists subscribe to a deterministic world-view in which the universe is nothing but a chain of meaningless events following one after another according to the law of cause and effect. According to this worldview there is no such thing as "free will", and therefore, no such thing as morality. Learning to bear the burden of a meaningless universe, and justify one's own existence, is the first step toward becoming the "Übermensch" (English: "overman") that Nietzsche speaks of extensively in his philosophical writings.

Existentialists have suggested that people have the courage to accept that while no meaning has been designed in the universe, we each can provide a meaning for ourselves.

In light of the difficulty philosophers have pointed out in establishing the validity of causal relations, it might seem that the clearest plausible example of causation we have left is our own ability to be the cause of events. If this is so, then our concept of causation would not prevent seeing ourselves as moral agents.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causality

Compatibilism

Compatibilism, also known as "soft determinism" and most famously championed by Hume, is a theory which holds that free will and determinism are compatible. According to Hume, free will should not be understood as an absolute ability to have chosen differently under exactly the same inner and outer circumstances. Rather, it is a hypothetical ability to have chosen differently if one had been differently psychologically disposed by some different beliefs or desires. Hume also maintains that free acts are not uncaused (or mysteriously self-caused as Kant would have it) but caused by our choices as determined by our beliefs, desires, and by our characters. While a decision making process exists in Hume's determinism, this process is governed by a causal chain of events. For example, a person may make the decision to support Wikipedia, but that decision is determined by the conditions that existed prior to the decision being made.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatibilism

Postmodernism

Postmodernism is any of a wide-ranging set of developments in critical theory, philosophy, architecture, art, literature, history, and culture, which are generally characterized as either emerging from, in reaction to, or superseding modernism.

In architecture, art, music and literature, postmodernism is a name for many stylistic reactions to, and developments from, modernism. Postmodern style is often characterized by eclecticism, digression, collage, pastiche, and irony. Some artistic movements commonly called postmodern are pop art, architectural deconstructivism, magical realism in literature, maximalism, and neo-romanticism. Postmodern theorists see postmodern art as a conflation or reversal of well-established modernist systems, such as the roles of artist versus audience, seriousness versus play, or high culture versus kitsch.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism

Nihilism

Nihilism as a philosophical position is the view that the world, and especially human existence, is without meaning, purpose, comprehensible truth, or essential value. Some philosophers are considered nihilists if they hold the philosophical position that either (1) nothing exists (all there is is nothing), or (2) reality we humans experience does not exist at all as we see it. It is more often a charge leveled against a particular idea than a position to which someone is overtly subscribed.

In the world of ethics, nihilist or nihilistic is often used as a derogatory term referring to a complete rejection of all systems of authority, morality, and social custom, or one who purportedly makes such a rejection. Either through the rejection of previously accepted bases of belief or through extreme relativism or skepticism, the nihilist is construed as one who believes that none of these claims to power are valid. From a nihilist point of view, the ultimate source of moral values is the individual rather than culture or another rational foundation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihilism

Determinism

Determinism is the philosophical proposition that every event, including human cognition and action, is causally determined by an unbroken chain of prior occurrences. No mysterious miracles or wholly random events occur. If there has been even one indeterministic event since the beginning of time, then determinism is false.

The principal consequence of deterministic philosophy is that free will (except as defined in strict compatibilism) becomes an illusion. It is a popular misconception that determinism necessarily entails that all future events have already been determined (a position known as Fatalism); this is not obviously the case, and the subject is still debated among metaphysicians. Determinism is associated with, and relies upon, the ideas of Materialism and Causality

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determinism

Conceptual art

In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conceptual_art

Minimalism in visual art

A minimalist painting, for example, will typically use a limited number of colors, and have a simple geometric design. Minimalist sculpture on the other hand is greatly focused on the materials (see David Smith and Donald Judd). While many believe minimalism to be a movement specific to geometric representations, it extends far outside this constraint.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimalism