>>I didn't reply to Chuck's post because his intent was unclear to me.
>>Reading it again, I suppose he is giving us a familiar narrative of decline
>>from modern to postmodern. If so, such an exercise has been already done,
>>with regard to Van Gogh's and Andy Warhol's shoes, for instance, so I don't
>>see any need to reproduce it. (This sort of narrative always reminds me of
>>Oswald Spengler's _The Decline of the West_.)
Yoshie,
It's been some time since I read Jameson's comments on VG and AW and postmo. But Jameson doesn't seem to be simply on about *decadence* in the movement from modernist to pomo aesthetics. Pomo as manifested in Warhol's shoes has much more to do with the fact that pomo aesthetics' only referent is late capitalism. So with Warhol's shoes there is an actual celebration of mass production and consumption. There is no sense of ironic detachment. Unlike the surrealists who use ready mades or "found art" to explore our modern fetishism as constitutive of modern consciousness; the surrealists attempted to make us self conscious of how our own processes of fetishization. Warhol just reproduces the commodity form. Simply an icon to the commodity. Interesting indeed but just doesn't seem to have the same critical function.
Now it's been a decade since I read Jameson and I have only seen a few Warhol pieces myself, and I understand that there was an essay on Warhol in a recent Critical Inquiry by PMattick Jr. Will have to look it up. I obviously have a very primitive understanding of these matters.
As for Spengler, Adorno had his number in his Prisms essay, no?
yours, rakesh