Richard Pennycuick on post-modernism:

>...  I keep seeing the word used as if it's taken for granted that
>everybody knows what it means.  I once spent some time on the web in
>search of an explanation until I admitted defeat.  Enlightenment, someone,
>please!

Some of the attempts at an explanation on this list seemed to me to
shed too little light too widely to render a focus.  As I recall, I
hope correctly, the expression_ post-modern_ came into wider usage (it
may have been used by specialists before then) due to the New York Times'
architecture critic of the time, Ada Louise Huxtable.  She used it to
describe a style of architecture that she rightly thought, was in nascence.
Its basic mark was that it bore no resemblance to modern classicism such
as epitomized by the likes of f Le Corbusier, Mies, the precepts of the
Dessau school of design, etc.  In other other words, it was a style that
was defined by what it was not.  From architecture the term then started
migrating to the other arts, notably music--and its semantic vibes carried
over to them.

Denis Fodor