Modernism vs.

Post-modernism the context

Modernism began at the end of the 19th Century and was influenced
by the new technologies and ideologies that permeated the period
(automobile, airplane, telephone, radio, telegraph, theory of relativity,
theory of evolution, Marxism, and Freud's views about the
unconscious). The result of these influences was that artists felt they
no longer had to adhere to strict conventions of what needed to go into
creating a painting, sculpture, architecture, music, and so on. In other
words, "tradition" was no longer a sacred cow. While traditional
art and all tradition, for that matter, emphasized the importance of
continuity -- that is, one generation should more or less maintain the
same standards and practices of the previous ones, modernism
suggested art must be investigative, similar to the way new
technologies and ideas were investigations, so that the arts and what
artists did could now be greatly expanded -- basically to art became
'whatever you could get away with.'

Postmodernism was a response to decades of modernist art.

What postmodernism asserted (during the second half of the 20th
Century) was that there were no new ideas or forms to be found in art,
as 100 years of experimentation were enough to explore new forms, so
that creating something "new" or "modern" would simply be a benign
and insignificant variation of something that was already investigated
or created. Thus, postmodernist critics claimed newness was
"exhausted." They did claim, however, that the next logical
progression in the arts and for the activity of artists was to
borrow, combine, refer to, imitate, comment on, etc., previous
works of art. So, postmodern artists should no longer seek
entirely new means
of creating art, but artwork would now become an
investigation of what was already new. A secondary idea of
postmodernism is/was that the creator or artist should no longer be
considered as being "creative." Rather, creativity was a natural aspect
of being, so that an artist, if she/he tuned into this vast pulse of
creativity, would be more of a vehicle for transmitting principles of art.