Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? ( Paul
Gauguin painting title) .Keith Martin-Smith has written that
humour- joke/irony- can be a powerful part of art. BUT,
complexity and skill of execution can and do exist, representing
the single, most important things to consider in judging art. To
Martin-Smith, art has become an inside job about an inside joke
that fewer and fewer people are interested in hearing: The
postmodern movement made a solid contribution by taking
modernism to its logical conclusion; it serves us well by
pointing out that all standards of judgment are based at least
in part in some kind of cultural bias; it legitimately freed up
unconscious and conscious systems of oppression that favored art
from one kind of group over another kind. And it correctly
pointed out that absolute standards in art, morals, or science
are impossible — the standards themselves are not fixed and
evolve, along with everything else in the known universe. But
while all these points are true, they can