By JULIE V. IOVINE

London—Postmodernism confuses people, right down to the way it is spelled: one word or two? Is it capitalized? Postmodern revels in such ambiguities.

One thing is certain, and it is the underscored point in an expansive exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, “Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970-1990.” Postmodernism liberated the arts, and especially architecture, from the puritanical rationalism of late modernism. Trouncing functionalism, efficiency, the monochromatic and just about every other revered tenet of the postwar modern, postmodernism unleashed a bacchanalia of creative output, a vast sampling of which is here on display.

Arranged as a journey from postmodernism’s beginnings as an architectural revolt and recapturing of history, and passing through spaces shaped like vectors, the exhibition is chockablock with material at all scales—from the tiniest polished-steel spoon with Mickey Mouse ears to the true-to-size reproduction of the towering “historical” columns from the 1980 architecture biennale in Venice. There’s a re-creation of the entrance to Garagia Rotunda, the garage studio in Cape Cod, Mass., designed by architecture critic and historian Charles Jencks, who purportedly coined the term postmodernism.

Postmodernism cannot easily be pinned down as a practice, a process, a style, an attitude or a gesture. And the exhibition doesn’t even try. It’s the brooding futuristic noir of Ridley Scott’s movie “Blade Runner”; rogue furnishings of the Memphis Group; Cindy Sherman’s self-portraits of herself as exotic others; David Byrne’s big white suit and deadpan lyrics. It is most unfortunately Philip Johnson’s AT&T (now Sony) building, with its dated punch line of a broken Chippendale pediment scraping the Manhattan skyline like chalk on a blue blackboard.

With jumbo screens running “Blade Runner” clips and a video looping through a Laurie Anderson performance, among quite few other video clips and soundtracks, the exhibition is almost too effective at capturing the frenetic energy of the movement. More celebration than evaluation, the show attempts to rescue postmodernism from its bad rap in recent years as glib, consumerist, cynical and prone to really bad puns and awful colors. Rightfully, it gives pride of place to architecture for its early engagement with PoMo. It was architects who most needed to wrestle free from the straitjacket of modernism.

Forget the sleek fabulousness of midcentury modern decor now starring in “Mad Men.” Modern architecture in the 1960s and ’70s was often doctrinaire, narrowly prescriptive, alienated from context and joyless. Architects today who studied at such modernist bastions as Harvard recall that Frank Lloyd Wright was persona non grata—never taught, not discussed. The modernist credo sworn in at the Bauhaus and dedicated to function and transparency in service to the masses, devoid of ornament and disdainful of local color, had evolved into the International Style, a corporate-friendly, glass-and-steel aesthetic seen at its best in Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building. In the wrong hands, however, modernism let loose an endless march of featureless office towers, sitting ducks for Tom Wolfe’s ridicule in “From Bauhaus to Our House,” where he gleefully nicknamed the Avenue of the Americas “Rue de Regret.”

Mr. Jencks stated famously that the postmodernist movement began at 3:32 p.m. on March 15, 1972, with the dynamiting of Pruitt-Igoe, a cereal-box housing complex in St. Louis routinely vandalized by its own occupants and so loathed that its violent destruction was celebrated. The exhibition begins with a wall-mural photo of the explosion and the Jencks quote that went with it, directed at Modernism: “After all, since it is fairly dead, we might as well enjoy picking over the corpse.”

The show does not mention more recent studies showing that residents of Pruitt-Igoe were actually happily at home in those of the towers that were properly maintained. It was not the architecture they rejected but management’s dereliction of duty.

If anything, postmodernism was about reanimating history. Where the International Style promised the same glass tower in a plaza anywhere in the world, postmodernism believed in history and context, the more the merrier: The elegant black glass with tasteful reflecting pools of the Seagram Building in New York versus the riot of classical arches and ionic columns, fountains and broken pediments of Charles Moore’s Piazza d’Italia in New Orleans. On a more serious note, postmodernism’s lively appreciation of the past fueled a wider interest in the preservation movement just when hardcore modernists were most intent on wiping the urban slate clean.

The exhibition does not reach back further than the usual PoMo landmarks to illuminate postmodernism’s origins. Much wall space is given to the 1966 Las Vegas road-trip taken by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown (with Steven Izenour and a load of Yalies), who were soon to be crowned the movement’s erudite pop philosophers for such thought-ticklers as “Less is a Bore,” “Main Street is almost All Right,” and “the decorated shed”—foundational concepts presented in their books “Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture” and “Learning from Las Vegas.”

In contrast, at the recent conference “Reconsidering Postmodernism,” organized by the Institute of Classical Architecture and Art in New York, European scholars Michelangelo Sabatino and Martino Stierli convincingly revealed how Ernesto Rogers and other postwar Italian architects were already thinking postmodern thoughts in the 1940s and ’50s. Even jaded academics took notice when an image flashed on the screen of Luigi Moretti’s 1950 Il Girasole, a kissing first cousin to Mr. Venturi’s 1962 Vanna Venturi House, one of the seminal icons of postmodernism.

Parody, collage, pastiche and posturing were all part of the postmodernist approach in what the V&A exhibition’s curators call an “unstable mix” of means and methods. The Internet’s instant access and global information reach and the horrors of 9/11 have made postmodernism’s ironic pose and backward glance seem almost quaint by comparison. “Postmodernism: Style and Subversion” has assembled a great many artifacts under its rubric, especially fascinating if you didn’t have to live with them the first time around. It does justice to the expansive plurality of the movement’s ideas but does not bring that past into our present. It all seems so long ago.

Ms. Iovine writes about architecture for the Journal.

By ERIC FELTEN

With the official holiday of romantic obligation looming, the Apple App Store is featuring dozens of “Apps for Valentine’s Day.” There are flower apps and message apps; diamond-ring apps and hookup apps. What do our mobile devices say about the state of modern love?

Many are the apps that deliver valentines via smart phone, but with lacy trappings to dress up what would otherwise be a plain old text. They are the eQuivalent of the old greeting card, and come with all the features that once seemed so whiz-bang, but have already become tired and trite. An email tarted up with off-the-shelf graphic design! A note with a personal photo embedded in it! Such apps are inevitably marketed with an emphasis on ease. Nothing says heartfelt devotion like convenience.

Nancy Stahl

Clumsy, tongue-tied suitors are promised “professionally written text messages” to send their squeezes.

Valentine’s Day once afforded sentimentalists the opportunity to scribble sonnets and such. However excruciating such amateur versification may have been, it did represent a measure of effort (as the songwriter said, “it takes thought and time and rhyme to make a poem sing”). Now it’s easy to create some original electronic doggerel with the Instant Poetry app. In the style of fridge magnets, random words loosely associated with love appear on the screen. Drag them around with your finger until they are in some sort of order (or not, incomprehensibility being a convenient virtue of modern poetry). Hit send. Who has time to try channeling Shelley?

Those in need of help even in the prose department can dig past the featured apps and find a number of programs eager to play Cyrano. Clumsy, tongue-tied suitors are promised “professionally written text messages” to send their squeezes. Consider this gem from Romantext: “I am so in love with you.” But, lame as it may be—reminiscent of the Lothario language Gene Kelly’s “Singin’ in the Rain” character improvises in “The Dueling Cavalier”—at least it’s a grammatical sentence. Much of the love talk offered in Appland appears to have been translated by a computer from the original Serbo-Croatian.

If you are fed up with the lovey-dovey business, there is an app offering a different sort of message, the “AntiValentine.” Typical of its eCards is what looks like the cover of a romance novel—a beau with a Pepsodent leer carrying a bikini-clad vixen in his well-muscled arms. The sentiment, in headline-bold type: “You’ll Do.” It may be snarky, but it does capture a certain truth for those who have learned all they know about courtship from watching “Jersey Shore.”

The App Store is crowded with matchmakers. All the obvious dating sites have mobile applications, but there are other options for seekers of soul-mates. ChuChuTune uses musical taste as a rough guide to compatibility. Take two smart phones with the program and press them together; in their embrace, the phones compare their music libraries and use the degree of overlap as a predictor of romantic success. Blendr combines users’ profiles and GPS technology to locate others “like you, near you.” The service promises to help one find those who share, for example, “your love for hiking, foreign films, or extreme sports.” Those without the app, of course, might always just go hiking or buy tickets to a Fellini festival and bank on serendipity to do the rest.

In this age of oversharing, some apps put a welcome premium on privacy. Cupple advertises itself as “the world’s first private sharing mobile application designed specifically for two people in a relationship.” These apps recognize there is peril in electronic intimacy, not least of which the ever-nagging risk that the personal will become all too public. If Anthony Weiner hadn’t been using Twitter to woo ladies with his boudoir snaps, he might still be in Congress today.

But however discreet one may try to be, digital romance has a grievous flaw—all that seeming ephemera is recorded, archived and made permanent. And discoverable. Which explains the survey released this week by the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers: “A resounding 92% of the nation’s top divorce attorneys say that they have seen an increase in the number of cases using evidence taken from iPhones, Droids, and other smart phones during the past three years.” For Valentine’s Day, Apple’s App Store showed forbearance in not featuring the many competing apps that allow the suspicious to track their spouses’ cellphones.

You don’t have to be up to no good to want to escape the Sauron-eyed tyranny of the digital this holiday. Sit down with some paper and a pen and write something to the one you love. If you want to dress up the presentation, get out the scissors, tape and glue ref. Apps have their ardent admirers. But when it comes to Valentine’s Day, it might be better to avail ourselves of that simple and elegant feature standard on every device: the off button.

—Write to me at EricFelten@WSJPostmodern.com.

By ELIZABETH GARONE

Q:
My wife joined a mentor program that was suggested to her by a very senior company official. The same official recommended a mentor who is only one level above her while everyone else has a mentor three levels higher. She feels very slighted and is not sure what to say — or if she should say anything at all. I know in this current uneasy environment workers probably don’t want any added responsibilities, which would make it difficult to find quality mentors.

Getty Images

Sometimes the most helpful mentors don’t necessarily come from “formal” programs.

A: While your wife might be disappointed about the choice for her mentor, she shouldn’t let those feelings get in the way of the relationship since it could very well turn out to be a valuable one, say experts.

“The position a mentor holds in the company is much less important than their ability to provide leadership advice and guidance,” says Roberta Chinsky Matuson, president of Northampton, Mass.-based Human Resource Solutions. “Also, this person may have much more influence than people who are two levels above in the organization.”

For example, being paired with a mentor who is the manager of new-product development at a consumer-products company could prove much more fruitful than being assigned the director of HR, says Ms. Chinsky Matuson. “That person (the new products manager) could very well have much greater influence with the company’s CEO,” she says.

It’s also important that your wife take into account who suggested the match — and that there was probably a good reason for it, says F. Mark Gumz, president and chief executive of the Americas unit of Olympus Corp. “Considering that this person was specifically recommended by a senior leader within her company, I’d encourage her to set aside perceptions of level and seniority and instead explore if this new mentor has the skills and life experiences that could benefit her own career growth,” he says. “Often, it is helpful to talk to someone who is at the next level rather than two or three levels above. The individual will probably be able to answer real questions and provide a contemporary view of what to expect.”

If it ends up that the relationship doesn’t turn out to be the best fit — and even if it does — she would be smart to explore outside official mentor channels for career guidance. Mr. Gumz says that he has found that the most helpful mentors don’t necessarily come from “formal” programs. “Some of the best mentors I’ve had throughout my career were people who befriended me or whom I befriended,” he says. “Having the opportunity to speak with them periodically, asking specific questions and seeking advice, has been invaluable.”

Your wife also needs to realize that in-house mentoring programs have specific goals in mind, and they often don’t mesh with what the person being mentored might hope to achieve. “A mentoring program is not meant to be a medium to fast track someone’s career, but instead offer one-on-one personal coaching to grow and nurture promising employees,” says Sherri Thomas, president of Career Coaching 360.

Rather than wait for someone else to dictate a mentor program to her, your wife should manage its path herself and expand its scope beyond the company doors. She’ll want to make it one “that brings together the best individuals from within her company and industry and that will allow her to assess what opportunities there are at her company as well as to gain knowledge for her future career,” says Mr. Gumz. By doing this, she will gain a broader base of mentors who can help her now and later when she’s ready to move on.

Write to Career Q&A at cjeditor@dowjones.com. Please include Career Q&A in your subject line.

By SARAH E. NEEDLEMAN

In today’s cutthroat job market, having a top-notch résumé is critical to success. But there’s a host of conflicting advice about exactly what makes a good résumé—and not every tip is right for every industry. To find out what hiring managers look for most in these documents, The Wall Street Journal introduces Résumé Doctor, a new feature in which recruiting experts and hiring managers critique readers’ résumés and suggest ways to improve them.

• The Job Seeker: Dawn Jordan, a 39-year-old marketing professional from Laguna Beach, Calif. Ms. Jordan, also a blogger for WSJ.com’s Laid Off & Looking blog, has been job hunting since her position as an operations vice president at Bank of America Corp. was eliminated in October 2008. She assembled her résumé with the help of an outplacement firm provided by her former employer and says it has helped her land several interviews but has yielded no job offers.
• The Job Objective: Ms. Jordan says she is looking for a mid- or senior-level executive position in marketing, preferably at a firm in Southern California. She is open to employers of all sizes in any industry.
• The Experts: Offering feedback on Ms. Jordan’s résumé are Peter Leech, chief marketing officer for Seattle-based retailer OnlineShoes.com; John M. Abele, global managing partner in the marketing-and-sales-officers practice in Cleveland for executive-search firm Heidrick & Struggles International Inc.; and Harry Joiner, founder of EcommerceRecruiter.com, a boutique recruiting agency in Atlanta that specializes in integrated marketing and new media.
• The Résumé: Ms. Jordan’s résumé is two pages in a classic format, leading with her contact information followed by a summary statement. It goes on to describe her career in reverse chronological order with bullet points describing each position and concludes with her educational background.
• The Positives: Our experts described Ms. Jordan’s document as well-organized and easy to read. They didn’t have any problems with its length, noting that two pages—or even three—can make sense for someone with her level of experience.

Mr. Joiner additionally gave kudos to Ms. Jordan for including in her document a variety of key words—terms that recruiters are likely to search for when combing their résumé databases. Job seekers can identify important keywords for their fields by looking at the language used in job descriptions. Words in Ms. Jordan’s résumé that Mr. Joiner says might help the document get noticed by marketing recruiters include “segmentation,” “analytics,” “cross-sell,” “P&L,” “CRM” and “SEO”—all critical for marketing roles. He adds that acronyms are fine to use but spelling them out in parentheses might be smart.

• The Advice: Our experts pointed to three flaws in Ms. Jordan’s résumé: a lack of essential details; ambiguous information; and grammatical errors.

For starters, these hiring experts say, it is critical to make sure a résumé has enough details and clarity about the work a candidate has done. Ms. Jordan’s résumé, like many they see, is missing specifics about her past positions, something that would help them get a better sense of how she progressed in her career. This is important, says Mr. Joiner, for showing that “an applicant can work their way up through an organization, and that they can lead and be led.”

For example, Ms. Jordan’s document doesn’t list the months she spent in each job at Bank of America, the regions or divisions she was responsible for, whom she reported to or how many employees reported to her. And lower down, two stints listed offer no description of what she did in those jobs. “People discount their early positions, but they can be helpful in explaining how they made their way up the ladder,” says Mr. Leech.

Some job hunters lump together descriptions for more than one position at a single firm, as Ms. Jordan did, to keep their résumés concise. Listed under each employer name are each job title and bullets describing all her responsibilities over three positions. But our experts say this made it difficult for them to see how she progressed from one job to the other.

Our experts noted another common omission from résumés in the education section. Ms. Jordan’s document failed to state what year she earned either of her degrees. She also didn’t say what she majored in for her undergraduate degree. While some professionals intentionally omit graduation dates to hide their age, “we always verify degrees anyway, so you might as well put them on there,” says Mr. Abele.

What’s more, hiding your age can raise recruiters’ suspicions about your integrity. “You’re asking someone to trust you enough to hire you, you might as well be open,” says Mr. Leech.

One piece of résumé advice to consider—and in particular for a marketing résumé like Ms. Jordan’s: a listing of your technological capabilities, because these can speak to your experience and credibility. In Ms. Jordan’s case, there is no mention of whether she has worked with market-research vendors such as Yankelovich or Mintel, or if she is proficient in market-research technologies like Oracle or Quickbase.

It turns out, Ms. Jordan is actually skilled in using Visio, SAS, JMP, Oracle, ComScore, Omniture, Webtrends and several other market-research technologies, all of which she has since added to her résumé.

“If your work has been touched or impacted by an important piece of software, then it makes sense to put that in a résumé,” says Mr. Joiner. Otherwise, recruiters may assume you’re lacking in this area.

If you aren’t knowledgeable in some areas you know recruiters will be looking for on a resume, be sure to include related expertise you do have, says Mr. Abele. Then prepare to talk about your ability to learn quickly and provide examples during the interview process.

But Mr. Abele, for his part, says it isn’t always necessary to list technological expertise if you are a management-level job hunter or above.

“For nonmanagerial positions however, technical skills do become more relevant,” he says. “Employers want someone who can plug and play pretty quickly.”

Our experts also say they would like to see more metrics in Ms. Jordan’s résumé that show how much savings or profits she generated for her past employers. And consistency is key; well-thought examples next to ambiguous ones can confuse a hiring manager. A good example from Ms. Jordan’s résumé is a bullet that says: “Cited by president for recouping $11 mil revenue by reversing deteriorating customer churn rate while achieving triple-digit ROI [return on investment].”

But other bullets come up short, such as one that says she “utilized real time customer data” but that doesn’t go on to describe any benefits that her employer gained as a result. “At the end of the day, that’s what a hiring manager is scanning for,” says Mr. Leech.

If you don’t have these details because the quantifiable results were meager, include them anyway—unless they are so poor they could eliminate you from consideration—and briefly explain why and what you learned as a result, adds Mr. Abele.

One element of Ms. Jordan’s résumé that the experts differed on was the summary. Mr. Leech says that Ms. Jordan’s summary, like many he sees, “doesn’t cut to the chase on what she’s done.”

Mr. Joiner argued that for a summary to be effective, it needs to be tailored for a specific position, something he recommends job hunters do for every job they seek—and ideally throughout the rest of their résumés. Executive recruiter Mr. Abele falls into the “who cares?” category; he says he skips past summaries.

Lastly, there is a piece of advice résumé-writers regularly give out (and job seekers sometimes forget): Check your spelling and grammar. If it isn’t your forte, have a friend check it for you.

Our experts noticed that in one sentence Ms. Jordan incorrectly used both past and present tenses. She also wrote “a” when she should have written “an.”

Such errors aren’t deal-breakers, but they do raise “a little bit of concern about someone’s focus on detail,” says Mr. Leech.

Write to Sarah E. Needleman at sarah.needleman@wsj.com

By LEE ADAIR LAWRENCE

Birmingham, Ala.

‘Chinese ceramics are good for the eye; Vietnamese ceramics are good for the heart.” This sentiment from an unnamed Vietnamese scholar quoted in the catalog of “Dragons & Lotus Blossoms” should be emblazoned at the show’s entrance. There could be no better invitation to this display of Vietnamese stoneware at the Birmingham Museum of Art, one of the top such collections in the U.S. along with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Curator Donald Wood’s installation is straightforward: With few exceptions, he groups all 220-plus of the collection’s vessels and ritual ware in table-high display cases that fill nine partitioned spaces. As with all displays of ceramics, there is an inherent frustration: Our fingers can’t explore the surface of a glaze; we can’t lift a ewer and marvel at how light—and therefore thin-walled—it is; we can’t flick the rim of a stoneware bowl and hear this high-fired clay ring like porcelain. All we have are our eyes, and what at first seems like a sea of ivories and browns reveals bowls in intense greens, jars with lively blue-and-white decoration, incised vegetal motifs faintly visible beneath thick glazes, and such startling pieces as a 24-inch-tall polychrome jar (16th century) with paintings of winged horses and demon-headed creatures.

In the process of discovery, we glean a liveliness of spirit and the occasional burst of humor. On a foot-tall ewer (12th to 14th century), a dragon dives into the round belly of the pitcher, its tail curling into a handle, its head bursting out the other end as a spout. Carved on the inside walls of a light-green bowl (13th to 14th century), long-necked cranes splay their wings as though braking to land on a barely discernible lotus bud. In the center of an incense burner from the same period, a dragon raises its head to blow out the smoke. Among the 15th- to 16th-century blue-and-white stoneware, a dish features a sprightly deer scampering along a river and a jar teems with needlefish darting in and out of seaweed.

The ties to China are obvious. Vietnamese potters in the clay-rich Red River Valley near the northern border with China had learned to make high-fired stoneware from the Chinese, somewhere around the first to third century. In the coming centuries they often imitated Chinese forms and glazes, and, as works in the Birmingham collection attest, they experimented. This was particularly true under the Ly (1009-1225) and Tran (1225-1400) dynasties, the first indigenous rulers after centuries of Chinese domination. The bulk of the Birmingham Museum’s collection is from this period, considered the heyday of Vietnamese ceramics, which, with no access to kaolin, do not include any porcelain.

Courtesy of the Birmingham Museum of Art

A 16th-century polychrome jar.

The portability of ceramics meant that many pieces escaped the ravages of a brief but violent Chinese occupation (1407-1427) and a long subsequent stretch of political turmoil and war. They made their way over trade routes to Thailand and other parts of Southeast Asia, Indonesia and Japan. It was in these countries that Birmingham collectors first began acquiring pieces for the museum.

This came at the instigation of the Asian art expert Sherman Lee, then director of the Cleveland Museum. In 1972, M. Bruce Sullivan, a Birmingham doctor who had served with the Navy in Asia after World War II, invited Lee down to give a lecture—and got more than he bargained for. Lee suggested that Sullivan and others begin collecting for the Birmingham Museum and steered them to, among other things, Vietnamese ceramics. They were beautiful, available and, compared to Japanese and Chinese works, still affordable.

From 1975 on, members of the newly formed Birmingham Asian Art Society donated Vietnamese ceramics to the museum, beginning with blue-and-white pieces and later expanding their gifts to include a variety of domestic and Buddhist ritual wares. As recently as 2010, the museum received a large collection bequeathed by one of the original members of the society, William M. Spencer III.

Dismissed as derivative and provincial by early-20th-century scholars, Vietnamese ceramics have since come into their own. Research on 14th-century sites in Japan, for example, indicate that tea masters prized these imports. In a display of pieces similar to those found in Japan we see two 13th- to 14th-century ivory-colored bowls, spare but for fluid calligraphic brushstrokes in brown iron-oxide. Moreover, the recovery of a cache of more than 240,000 Vietnamese ceramics between 1997 and 1999 has enabled scholars to establish dates and identify patterns. These came from a cargo vessel shipwrecked a few miles from the port of Hoi An sometime in the late 15th to early 16th century. The show includes a long but fascinating documentary on the subject.

These finds have not provided all the answers—scholars still don’t know why, as we see on two upturned bowls, many potters covered the base of vessels with chocolate-brown pigment. But with so many pieces to study, scholars can now better trace the inventiveness of Vietnamese potters who developed forms such as bowls with sharply inverted rims and beakers with straight sides. They also introduced decorations that combined dragons and flowers, a pairing not seen in Chinese pieces. By not including Chinese prototypes, the display makes it sometimes hard to appreciate the distinctiveness referred to in the wall texts. But the advantage is that it plunges us into a Vietnamese aesthetic that variously calms the soul and delights the heart.

Ms. Lawrence is a writer in Brooklyn, N.Y.