Maeg, I’m intrigued by your suggestion that the current culture wars can be seen in terms of modernism v. postmodernism.
Is it really as simple as choosing one over the other? With each ism to come along, we tend to pick up some aspects (hopefully the better ones) of that school of thought as we move into the next age and incorporate them into our larger view of culture. Did romanticism defeat classicism? Or do we see elements of both in our current cultural values?
The pendulum swings far, and I would agree that right now, it’s pretty far over into the realm of the postmodern, and as a result we have annoying things that are endlessly self-referential and caught up in the importance of reception to the neglect of the importance of achievement. It’s a cycle, and I suspect the novelty of postmodernism will eventually wear off, we will incorporate the ideas of observation and interaction into our definition of the arts, and then move on to the next big thing, which is probably happening as we speak.