Postmodernism and Aesthetics: Collide or Steer presents twenty-two artists who were awardees of the contemporary visual art competition by the AHL Foundation. All of them spent their youth in the 1990s as immigrant artists or as fine art students studying-abroad in the United States. While postmodernism gained momentum in South Korea during an economic boom in the 1990s, a milieu of fine arts departments at major universities as well as art markets in Seoul, still maintained a purity of high modernism in abstract painting. Organized by curator and professor Kyunghee Pyun at the Fashion Institute of Technology, this exhibition overviews the current status of twenty-two artists from Korea living and working in the United States. The show divided artists and their works into most popular binary themes of postmodernism and high modernism such as appropriation/originality; local/ international; simulacra/real; banal/avant-garde; and personal/universal.

In this monograph Paul Crowther seeks to overcome some of the antagonistic positions taken in recent debates about postmodernism. He addresses such issues as the relation between art and politics, artistic creativity, and sublimity and the postmodern sensibility. His analysis of these themes centres on the interplay between what is constant and what is historically variable in human experience.

A Return to Aesthetics confronts postmodernism's rejection of aesthetics by showing that this critique rests on central concepts of classical aesthetic theory, namely autonomous form, disinterest, and symbolic discourse. The author argues for the value of these concepts by recovering them through a historical reinterpretation of their meaning prior to their distortion by twentieth-century formalism. Loesberg then applies these concepts to a discussion of two of the most significant critics of the ideology of Enlightenment, Foucault and Bourdieu. He argues that understanding the role of aesthetics in the postmodern critique of Enlightenment will get us out of the intellectual impasse wherein numbingly repeated attacks upon postmodernism as self-contradictory match numbingly repeated defenses. Construing postmodern critiques as examples of aesthetic reseeing gives us a new understanding of the postmodern critique of the Enlightenment.

The Postmodern Scene is a series of major theorisations about key artistic and intellectual tendencies in the postmodern condition

"In this important new lecture - which was widely acclaimed throughout Australia when delivered - Peter Fuller argues that a change of sensibility is sweeping through the Western world. Modernism, with its meaningless, 'functional' forms of Architecture and 'anaesthetic' painting, can now be seen to be dead. But what hope is there of anything better taking its place? In this provocative and sensitively argued study, Peter Fuller traces the origins of the present cultural crisis back into the decay of religious belief, and the change in the nature of work that took place with the Industrial Revolution. Fuller claims that we may now be facing an imminent General Anesthesia - which may engulf us all."--Text from back cover