Modernism as subjective Bayesianism

Mistakenly trying to understand artistic movements

Status: draft, last updated 2023-04-23

This post is really just a placeholder. For a while I’ve wanted to try to understand artistic movements, but as a mathematician I only speak with an impoverished vocabulary.

There is an movement called realism, which attempts to accurately reflect the subject matter. Then, there is a movement called modernism, which departs from realism by focusing on the more subjective. This is probably quite contrived, but in a Bayesian framing realists are more about the likelihood and modernists emphasise the prior, or the different ways in which evidence can be interpreted.

All very well, but with art things can’t remain as they are for long, and just as realism was departed from, so too was modernism. Now we have postmodernism, and metamodernism. Upon which axis do postmodernists or metamodernists disagree with modernists? I’m doubtful that it’s on the interpretation of evidence – these movements don’t seem particularly aligned with realism. Maybe one day I’ll figure it out, or just read a book about it. Perhaps then I’ll post the answer here.