Post Class 9/24 Courtney Sparling

I felt that in today's class we really pulled things together, especially by starting off with the practice exam. I feel more ready for Monday's exam now that I've seen how it is set up and how I am expected to respond, in essay format. I'm going to take Dr. C's advice by studying little by little each day and taking one reading at a time. I think that this will significantly help me on the exam.

I also thought that since Lyotard was pretty difficult for me to understand that this class helped me to clarify and rethink some things that I had misinterpreted and/or completely missed. I like going over the readings, quote by quote, on the PowerPoint so that it can be broken down and I can take in each idea one step at a time.

Today, I felt like I grasped more of Lyotard, especially when we talked about controversy and how in art, it makes people want to see it more, and therefore makes the artwork even more popular/famous, to the artists' benefit.

We talked about Piss Christ, a photograph I had learned about last year in an art history class. The artist actually put a small crucifix in a glass of his own urine and snapped a picture. The photograph, as you can imagine, created an uproar. The uproar in return caused the artwork to become well known since everyone wants to see what all the fuss is about.

I think an important term that we can get out of this reading is the idea of totalizing metanarratives. If everything is so universal and generalized, in postmodernism, the focus turns to the individual. These metanarraitves are a dominating form of thought, such as Christianity or Socialism. They tell people how to think/act in a cultural setting. Postmodernism, as I see it, tries to break up these metanarratives.