To fairly view postmodernism, it is important to consider modern art. The reason being is that postmodernism is seen as the critical review of the history and institution of modern art. Modern art is at the heart of post modernism and the similarities in them can easily be portrayed. Also the word post in postmodernism and other artist periods will be considered, along with the ideas that created postmodernism and modern art.

             The "post" in postmodernism implies less a chronological succession than an opposition, and an intimate connection. The term postmodernism is sometimes accused of being '.the inflated focus for such a range of contradictory investments" (Hebdige, 1992: 331) that sorting out its precise relationship to what went before is difficult. But, though postmodernism can be defined as having a number of sources, such as '.the recrudescence of the cultural avant garde, the penetration of cultural life by the commodity form, [or] the exhaustion of certain classical bourgeois ideologies,"(Eagleton, 1995: 68) its primary source, and its principle subject for critique, is modernism. In the various ways in which modernity serves as its focus, postmodernism justifies its title. In most definitions of postmodernism, the failings of modernity are clearly the basis from which the later movement derives its impetus. Whether it is the failure of modernity to continue to inspire confidence in its progressive ideal of modernisation or the cooption of modernity by the very economic and social forces it originally opposed, the status of modernity is at the heart of postmodernist undertakings.

             Few cultural movements (periods, phenomena) have been labelled post-anything. Generally, broad cultural changes over periods of time are defined in terms of arcs (ie., early, classic, late, or archaic, classical and decadent). Such naming takes advantage of distance in time and at least relative ignorance of cultures' views of their cultural productions.