Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

This article confronts and tries to describe the relationship and difference between modern and postmodern art and the cultural movements involved with each form. The discussion of Van Gogh's shoes and Andy Warhols shoes raise important notions of how the different aesthetic canons in art are affected by the culture and vice versa. When describing Van Gogh, the author uses Heidegger to describe how Van Gogh's art emerges within the gap between the earth and the world. From his description, i infered that the gap Heidegger is talking about is the difference between what the actual earth is like and how human beings or people come to understand the earth from their own perspective, shaping their own world. All of the images in the painting are equipment used by certain people, and Van Gogh's depiction of the certain equipment is meant to represent truth in a sense that these certain objects, dirty shoes and poorly made huts, belong to this idealized version of a homeless women. The author thus calls Van gogh's painting utopian, in which i think that Van Gogh is creating an image or symbol of what he sees as uniformly poor, where all people who see this image would describe the woman as impoverished and make connections to universal symbols of poverty.

However, when discussing the postmodern art of Andy Warhol, the canons of visual art change, which can be noticed in the commodification of aesthetic material. Truth is abandoned, and a sense of a universal symbol is not acknowledged. The depiction of shoes by Warhol show a fatness and lack of depth that create a superficiality of the images themself. They seem larger then life or unreal, and due to the realism of photography and playfullness of changing the realistic colors, any notion of utopian images become negligible. The point is that the postmodern art tends to create an indifference to the subject material, for they are reproduced into a mass media commodity that all people can see over and over again until the meaning dissipates. No matter how many times one see's Van Gogh's potato peelers there is a sense of grotesque humanity, and emotions are triggered. But when Marilyn Monroe, or better yet Mao, are reproduced many times with multi colors, the sexuality of Marilyn becomes obscured and the ruthlessness of communist china becomes non-existant. The two characters become symbols of Warhol and art, and as people view his images there is an indifference to the world around them, and a lack of meaningful truth. this article describes many other canon's that can be seen in postmodern art but the language is confusing and abstract, so naturally i assume postmodern art is confusing and abstract. I enjoyed the article, though at times it gave me a headache, and i would like to look at more postmodern art and desriptions in order to get a better understanding of it.