yellowdaisy4, Lyotard

I found the Lyotard reading to be interesting because he expressed his view on what postmodernism is which helps me figure it out for myself. What I found to be one of the most important concepts in this reading was the concept of the sublime. Lyotard mentioned a few times about ideas like “modernity, in whatever age it appears, cannot exist without a shattering belief and without discovery of the ‘lack of reality’, together with the invention of other realities”. At first, I had a hard time trying to understand what he meant by this explanation but his examples of how you can’t illustrate some ideas like that of the world or of the simple because “ those are ideas of which no presentation is possible”. For something to be modern, like a painting which is the example Lyotard gave, one must make these things visible. I think he was saying what the sublime is, is the relation between what is presentable and what is imaginable.
Another quote that made way more sense to me that Lyotard stated was that of the “realism of the anything goes is in fact that of money; in absence of aesthetic criteria.” What that means is the more money something makes, the more beautiful in is in our society. I find that to be sad but true. An example, in everyday, is how most people take beautiful things like flowers that are all around and free for granted but spend thousands of dollars on expensive things like rings and watches because society tells them that is what is beautiful and build up by making it more unattainable. This also makes me think of what we were talking about in class regarding the Mona Lisa painting. The painting itself is not that unique or beautiful in that it’s just a woman posing but the fact that it’s worth so much money and so famous is why people think it’s so aesthetically pleasing and worth travel around the world for.