Mike of Modernity(or post?)

Though Jurgen Habermas' "Modernity-an Incomplete Project" was not able to successfully simplify the chaotic,fractal nature of post-modern ideology into easy-to-comprehend bite size pieces for my addled consciousness to digest, I found his thoughts on the changing values and conceptions of art veracious and almost pithy. He speaks of a period in the nineteenth century when an "aesthetic conception of art emerged, which encouraged the artist to produce his work according to the distinct consciousness of art for art's sake". After that moment nothing would ever be the same in the human conception of art. It freed its followers to create art in order to reify the very concept of art itself, to explore the landscape of the mind while "detached from the constraints of routinized cognition and everyday action". This paradigm shift in thought has spawned all of these seemingly separate ideologies. Postmodernism was created as a reaction to modernism, yet they seem share the same core idea about the very personal and intransitive nature of art. Though both Habermas and his foil Lyotard seem diametrically opposed to each other - one can't really tell what school of thought they really ascribe to. So much of postmodernism borrows from modernity, and both seem to share the idea that defining art as "beautiful" is a chaotic task. But I feel that perhaps these feuding schools of thought are what contribute to the chaos, a self-assurance of survival in a tempestuous world. It is the freeing of the artist to create without boundaries (at least hypothetically) that "modern" or "post-modern" thinking has borne. Whether these creations be hideous or radiant to behold will always be a matter for those who chose to experience it to decide for themselves. For the truly free artist to exist in this time seems regrettably unlikely. Influence is impossible to deny or dodge, be it economic, political or familial. It is the spirit of a free artist that must be maintained, that must be fruitlessly divined to inspire us to create something truly sublime.