Fredric Jameson and the No Wave Art Movement
Working within a Marxist framework, social theorist Fredric Jameson links the emergence of particular art aesthetics with the development of a specif ic Western economic system in his text, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1990). With latecapitalism as the current economic environment, Jameson demonstrates how these economic conditions bear on cultural and artistic production. According to Jameson, cultural production in late-capitalism is identif iable through a use of pastiche or copying. Jameson describes this as random cannibalization (17-18). In postmodern art, history is self-consciously reappropriated and re-fashioned into new forms. Postmodern art, Jameson argues, was a logical outcome of late-capitalism, which in its late stage has allowed society to abolish the distinction between high culture and mass culture, producing a culture of degradation. This was first taken up as an aesthetic by Andy Warhol. In the text, Postmodernism: Style and Subversion, 1970-1990, Adamson and Pavitt note that Jameson, “found Warhol 's glittering series Diamond Dust Shoes to be particularly unnerving because of its incorporation of
commodity culture” (70). Art, according to both Warhol and Jameson is above all, a commodity, something to be bought and sold. Warhol 's work illustrates Jameson 's contention that, "Aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production" (4). This conflation of art and commodity creates a field of cultural production that is incapable of depth and valuable social critique. According to Jameson, the abstract aesthetic of modernism was an expression of the new social forms of abstraction specif ic to capitalism. In modernism, the universalization of the money-form manifests as a range of social abstractions including, for example, society 's dominant "way of seeing” and representing the world aesthetically. In the age of global capitalism, the utopian sublime of modernism, to which Jameson referred,
commodity culture” (70). Art, according to both Warhol and Jameson is above all, a commodity, something to be bought and sold. Warhol 's work illustrates Jameson 's contention that, "Aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production" (4). This conflation of art and commodity creates a field of cultural production that is incapable of depth and valuable social critique. According to Jameson, the abstract aesthetic of modernism was an expression of the new social forms of abstraction specif ic to capitalism. In modernism, the universalization of the money-form manifests as a range of social abstractions including, for example, society 's dominant "way of seeing” and representing the world aesthetically. In the age of global capitalism, the utopian sublime of modernism, to which Jameson referred,
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