Ironic Strategies of Postmodern Art Games

Postmodernism has left a significant number of strategies to imitate art. They all rely on the game, offering to “play art”. The way of existing in Postmodernism in the form of the game is possible due to the broad interpretation of the concept of the “game” in modern aesthetics. The game principle in the works of Baudrillard, Lyotard, Debord and Gadamer is absolutised as the basis of the social interactions within which art is created. The methodology of the postmodern games is worked out and at the same time turns into arbitrariness in science, everyday life and social life, depriving them of certainty and consistency, making the principle of process the most important quality of any activity, including artistic one. In the postmodern game, hyperreal, carnival and marginal features are outlined. It is the basis of imitation, combinatorics, pastiche and intertextuality as the text production strategy. As a result, a playing text appears, erasing any differences and hierarchies. The game appropriates the place of the sacred and parodying, declining and desecration become the leading forms of creativity. The game turns into a masquerade, acquiring performative-spectacular forms, performing the function of returning the past to the present, preserving the lost tradition. The game within the cultural framework defined the field of the unserious. The game that has swallowed up culture, deprives it of its seriousness, puts it beyond morality, making evil and death a thing of the past. The game allows Postmodernism to overcome the finality of art. Within the framework of the total playful nature of Postmodernism, the new avant-garde technologies of irony, nihilism, labyrinth, chaos, creativity, authorship, and representation are filled with new content