In recent years viewers have been confronted with a variety of movements and styles, baffling in their diversity. The range of significant work extends from the nonobjective to the meticulously realistic, from systems-oriented to purposefully casual, from process-oriented to object-concerned, from blandly apolitical to determinedly political, from gallery-structured to work representing the street culture, from technologically inspired to craft-derived, and from small indoor-scaled forms to those concerned with the exterior environment. Furthermore, the old hierarchical differences between art forms have been pulverized, since photography and ceramics, glass making, and other so-called craft media are now considered equal to painting and sculpture.

Opposing views have been stated freely and argued openly in the pages of magazines and in artists' forums. For example, the figurative painter Jack Beal said in 1979, "I think that what we have to try to do . . . is to make beautiful paintings about life as we live it, by verifying and celebrating the good parts of life as we live it," but Richard Serra, the Anti-Form sculptor, mentioned in 1982, "it's not the business of art to deal with human needs." The different ideas about the functions of an art critic can be summed up by contrasting the sculptor Dan Flavin's assertion in 1970 that he knew of "no occupation in American life so meaningless and unproductive as that of art critic," with the critics Michael Fried's and Donald Kuspit's desires to assign value and historical significance to specific works or movements. But all of this only serves to underline the pluralism and exciting instability in recent American art.

It is appropriate at this point to consider the term "post-modernism," which has been commonly used since the 1970s. Although it is not necessary to create a list of movements or artists containing post-modern characteristics, it is worthwhile to indicate briefly some ways to define the term. Broadly speaking, modernism was and still is concerned with exploring issues of trying to understand something about the world, of discovering one's place in the world, and of exploring issues of interpretation and communication. Post-modernism, by contrast, is more concerned with the ultimate unknowableness of the self, of things, of values, and of what had been considered basic understandings. Modernism allows to a greater extent the possibility of human endeavor, authenticity, and agency. Post-modernism asserts the reverse, that we are products of forces -political, cultural, linguistic -- which prevent us from any kind of ultimate understanding and that our intentions are less our own, less personal, than the results of those forces working upon and through us. . .