Much of modern art's earlier history, from movement to movement, was still organised around some version of a shared, forward-moving narrative — a sense that art was progressing toward some clearer, purer or more advanced way of representing form, colour or meaning. Postmodern art, emerging from roughly the 1970s onward, rejected that underlying assumption directly: rather than proposing its own single unified direction to replace the ones it succeeded, it embraced pastiche, appropriation of existing images and styles, and a pervasive layer of irony, treating the very idea that one narrative could define what counts as legitimate, serious art as itself the thing worth challenging.
Earlier movements still shared an underlying story about progress
Even as one modern art movement gave way to the next, rejecting the specific stylistic choices of whatever came before it, most of them still shared an underlying assumption that art was moving somewhere — toward greater abstraction, toward a purer exploration of form, toward some deeper or more authentic mode of representation. Each new movement's rejection of the previous one still generally operated within that same larger framework: a movement was progress relative to what it replaced, even while attacking that predecessor's specific choices.
Postmodern art challenged the framework itself, not just its previous occupant
Postmodern art broke with that pattern at a more fundamental level, questioning the underlying premise that art was moving toward any single legitimate direction at all, rather than simply proposing yet another direction to supersede the last. This showed up concretely in postmodern art's characteristic techniques: pastiche freely combined styles and references from different historical periods without treating any one of them as more authentically legitimate than the others; appropriation directly repurposed existing images, often from mass media or earlier art itself, deliberately blurring the line between original creation and quotation; and a pervasive ironic distance kept postmodern work from claiming the kind of sincere, singular authority that earlier movements had often implicitly claimed for their own particular vision.
What we're still unsure about
That postmodern art marked a genuine, identifiable break from the progress-oriented narrative underlying much earlier modern art, and that pastiche, appropriation and irony are widely recognised as characteristic postmodern techniques, are well documented in art history. What remains more genuinely contested is whether postmodernism, as an art-historical period, has actually ended and been succeeded by something else, or whether contemporary art is still best understood as continuing, extending or complicating postmodern approaches rather than having genuinely moved past them — critics and art historians continue to disagree about where, or whether, that particular line should be drawn.
This sits inside Contemporary & Postmodern Art, one of seven topics in Art History, one of five domains in Art, one of seventeen subjects the app can quiz you on.