Modernism. Postmodernism. Metamodernism? We get it, you went to college. What do these terms mean, and why should you care…like, at all? Well, let’s get into it, dummy.
There is a feeling today—call it existential static—that many of us can’t shake. It hisses beneath our daily routines, an unrelenting interference pattern of doomscrolling, irony, and self-aware exhaustion. It’s in the way we swipe past memes and tragedies in the same motion, the way we toggle between sincerity and irony in conversation, never quite sure which is more appropriate. It’s the dissonance between yearning to care and fearing that caring is naive.
Sound like anyone you know?
This static has taken different forms over the past century, shifting from modernism to postmodernism, and most recently to metamodernism. These aren’t just academic labels; they shape how we see and move through the world. They determine how we engage with reality, from the books we read to the movies we love to the way we curate our online selves. Understanding them isn’t just an intellectual exercise; it’s a way of navigating the contradictions of our time.
Still with me? It gets better.
Modernism tells us meaning is real and discoverable. Postmodernism tells us meaning is an illusion. Metamodernism suggests that, even if meaning is an illusion, we should act as if it’s real anyway. This isn’t some abstract theory; you can feel it in why Hemingway reads differently than David Foster Wallace, why a Christopher Nolan film hits differently than a Quentin Tarantino film, and why certain types of humor—say, The Office—manage to be both deeply heartfelt and deeply ironic at the same time.
Art, in all its forms, has always been humanity’s best tool for weaving coherence out of the static.
Modernism: The Search for Truth Through Structure
Imagine a painter in 1917. They have rejected the pastoral landscapes of the past, seeing them as naive relics of a bygone era. Instead, they take a brush and, in a moment of pure conviction, carve sharp geometric shapes onto the canvas—bold, unrelenting, a vision of the future. This is modernism. It is Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, the calculated chaos of Joyce’s Ulysses, the soaring, clean lines of Bauhaus architecture. It is the steam locomotive surging forward.
Born in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, modernism was fueled by a relentless faith in progress. Science was solving mysteries, technology was reshaping society, and artists, writers, and thinkers were convinced that new forms of expression could unlock deeper truths.
But then the world cracked.
The 20th century delivered not just skyscrapers and symphonies but also world wars, propaganda machines, and industrialized death. The very rationality that modernists worshipped was revealed to be a double-edged sword—yes, it could build utopias, but it could also build Auschwitz. The grand narrative of progress began to falter. And in that growing skepticism, another sensibility took root.
Postmodernism: The Deconstruction of Meaning
Fast-forward to 1962. That same modernist geometric painting hangs in a gallery, but next to it stands an installation: a Campbell’s soup can, magnified and stripped of context. A critic leans in, smirking. “But is it art?” someone asks. The answer, postmodernism suggests, is beside the point.
Postmodernism is Warhol’s factory, where mass production and irony are the medium. It is Pynchon’s labyrinthine plots, where certainty dissolves. It is Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, a film stitched together from cinematic history itself. If modernism was the dream of utopia, postmodernism is the realization that utopias collapse under their own contradictions. It sees no single truth, only versions, simulacra, self-aware winks. History loops back on itself, everything references something else, and meaning is forever in quotation marks.
If modernists were architects, postmodernists were dynamiters, delighting in watching the walls collapse.
For a while, this was exhilarating. Postmodernism shattered illusions, called out hypocrisy, showed us that everything—history, culture, even identity—was a construct. But after decades of irony and cynicism, a new question emerged:
What now?
Metamodernism: The Oscillation Between Irony and Sincerity
A metamodernist knows that art is a product of capitalism—but still cries at movies. A metamodernist understands that love is just a biochemical response—and yet still books a flight they can’t afford. A metamodernist is both skeptical and sincere, ironic and hopeful, detached and deeply, painfully engaged.
This is why David Foster Wallace wrote with a kind of post-ironic sincerity, acknowledging that our generation is trained to be cynical but suggesting that, maybe, we should rebel against that instinct. It’s why Wes Anderson films create tiny, artificial worlds that somehow feel more emotionally real than reality itself.
Where Seinfeld’s postmodern nihilism basked in blunt disregard, new entrants like Parks and Recreation, Community, and Modern Family take on a new heart within their irony. They oscillate between self-awareness and sincerity, using postmodern tools to craft something unexpectedly earnest.
You can find it in art with Banksy, in music with Frank Ocean, in architecture with Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), in philosophy with Bruno Latour… you’ll find it anywhere nowadays.
Metamodernism doesn’t ignore postmodernism’s lessons. It knows meaning is constructed—but it builds it anyway.
Epilogue: Sound Art and the Next Phase of Meaning
These cultural sensibilities don’t just shape literature and cinema. They reverberate—literally—through sound…in some of the weirdest art exhibitions you can find.
Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting in a Room (1969) starts with a simple spoken phrase, recorded and played back in a loop until language dissolves into the resonant frequencies of the room itself. Stick with me—the piece reflects modernism’s faith in structure but also carries postmodernism’s deconstruction of meaning—speech breaking down into pure sound.
Maryanne Amacher’s Sound Characters (Making the Third Ear, 1999) manipulates psychoacoustics to generate “ghost tones” that seem to emerge inside the listener’s head, by resonating the bone of the inner ear. This blurs the boundary between external reality and perception itself, embodying a postmodern questioning of what is “real.”
Janet Cardiff’s The Forty Part Motet (2001) places a choral arrangement across 40 speakers so that listeners “recompose” the work simply by moving through space. It acknowledges postmodernism’s awareness of fragmented perspectives but chooses to construct meaning through participation rather than dissolution.
Sound art may not start revolutions, but it provides the raw frequencies from which revolutions resonate. The best of these ideas—how systems shape thought, how perception is manipulated, how meaning is constructed—can be extracted, refined, and applied elsewhere. If postmodernism dismantled meaning and metamodernism wavered between engagement and detachment, then what comes next must be a mindset that embraces complexity with clarity.
The challenge isn’t just to experience these works—it’s to listen for the future we are already composing.
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