I want to mainly touch the topic of the modern art. My generation grew up in an atmosphere of uncertainty of the 90s (after the collapse of the Soviet Union), watching the Simpsons and South Park, in which the irony and cynicism of the culture of postmodernism became an integral setting that penetrated us. However, despite or contrary to this phenomenon, a strong desire to understand the meanings and changes of the modern culture has led to the formation of the current state of the dominant culture.
Our ideas about the world have changed – now, it seems disordered, unpredictable, unreliable, non-deterministic – all this made a person look for new forms of behavior in it. The irony no longer scares us, we consistently combine it with the search for a new sincerity in art and philosophy; we are, like a pendulum, swing from a modernist idea to the postmodern one, and back. This is the “supra-modern”, metamodernist position of constantly changing modi (plural of modus) of interaction with the world and culture, the position of a possible choice between irony and sincerity, and their combination.
Since postmodernism was characterized by such features as deconstruction, irony, stylization, relativism, nihilism, and renunciation of general concepts (with the goal of creating a caricature), the discourse on the essence of metamodernism will cover the process of reviving sincerity and hope, and a return to general concepts and universal truths, until we lose all that we have learned in the framework of the culture of postmodernism.
Thus, instead of marking a return to the naive ideological positions of modernism, metamodernism proclaims that our time is in a state of hesitation between aspects of the cultures of modernism and postmodernism. Metamodernism is a combination of enlightened naivety, pragmatic idealism, moderate fanaticism and hesitations between irony and sincerity, construction and deconstruction, apathy and attraction, trying to achieve a state of excellence and truth again, as if it were within our power. The generation of metamodernism realizes that we can be sarcastic and genuine at the same time; one does not have to oppress the other.
The postmodern concepts of “decentration”, “deconstruction”, and “deterritorialization” are still relevant today. If postmodernism is characterized by destruction, irony, shepherd, relativism, nihilism, then metamodernism affects a surge of sincerity, hope, romanticism, influence, universal truths.
Reality in metamodernism “escapes” to the background and constructs a subjective reality that does not completely move away from reality, but has a tendency to deepen into the subject. The reality of consciousness is a ‘universe’, because it contains everything, including reality and truth; that’s what the modern art is focusing on.