Chapter 31

Chapter thirty-one emphasizes the difference between cultural aspects such art, ideology, and social class today versus what it used to be. This is the idea of postmodernism. These ideas from Fredric Jameson state that all of the exquisite works of art from one hundred years ago are becoming replaced with a new, modern idea of art. Jameson calls this era "empirical, chaotic, and heterogeneous". Modern art has been replaced with postmodern art such as Andy Warhol, new expressionism, and punk and new wave rock (such as the Beatles). Jameson believes that the fundamental feature of all the postmodernisms is the "effacement in them of the older (high-modernist) frontier between high culture and mass or commercial culture". This means that all of the postmodernisms, or postmodernist music or art, are based off of different things in our culture that are "degrading" and pointless to our education and appreciation of artwork. Some of these things include reality t.v., magazines, comedy shows, non-educational movies, etc. This is true because many things are influenced by our postmodern culture. For example, the book Twilight was filmed as a movie, and now there are several television shows and other movies that are all about vampires (such as Vampire Diaries, True Blood, Vampires Suck, etc.) There are also commercials that use vampires to advertise their products (such as Bing). Nowadays, whenever popular movies come out, there are clothing lines with the characters from the movie, as well as lunch boxes, pencils, blankets, lamps, and really any other object you could think of.

Postmodernism started to replace "an aesthetic style and approach to culture and life" known as modernism around 1960. Postmodernism is different than modernism because it includes local narratives, fragmented style, it is eclectic and anarchical, it merges high culture and pop culture, and includes pop art, photorealism, punk, and schlock art. Modernism has master (meta) narratives and a unified style, it is harmonious, hierarchical, it separates high culture over pop culture, and it includes abstract expressionism, classical music styles, and "serious" art.