You're best forgetting you ever heard the word. Or at least remembering that it is only a word. Postmodernism has been erased of all meaning because it has been given so much speculation. How the scholars of our age think they can already begin to categorize contemporary art is beyond me. Contemporary is all we should classify art of today as, how can we call it anything else? We need history on our side to make any accurate conjecture about the motives and directions and patterns of artistic innovation.
In my opinion postmodernism is just a term to make people sound smarter than they are. It should be wiped off the planet along with Regis Philbin and Kanye West sunglasses. It's good in your title you mentioned form alongside postmodernism, because that's what counts. It's too early to analyze the artistic movement or age we are in, instead we should focus on the specific and look at art pieces as individual works. We should investigate form and its function in a work and speak to that rather than just throw this lumpy word wherever it seems applicable and easier to say than an explanation. "Oh my god that arm chair is so postmodern, it looks like a pickle that has gone through the womb!" Alright, how does the birth cycle of a pickle cultivate its postmodernism? It would be more accurate to call it postcucumberism.
From now on whenever you see the word postmodern show up in a text look at the voice of the text and determine what that voice has accomplished in the text. Is it just a jumble of criss-crossing repetitions, or a valuable interpretive essay? Since as you say postmodernism has so many different definitions, when it is used, it is of the utmost importance that its user explains exactly why he used that word. And if you ever find yourself tempted to use the word postmodern, be ready to defend its usage, be absolutely certain you know why something is postmodern or else you will just be adding to the confusion of the entire term.
A Fun little quote from Umberto Eco :
The postmodern reply to the modern consists of recognizing that the past, since it cannot really be destroyed, because its destruction leads to silence, must be revisited: but with irony, not innocently. I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her, “I love you madly,” because he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solution. He can say, “As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly.”
