modern vs post modern

In the article, “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” Frederic Jameson argues that postmodern art is the deconstruction of expression. Modern art was individualized; it was symbolic, and talent centered. Its artwork was filled with anxiety and alienation like Munch’s The Scream. He argues the end of modernism was the result of the post-industrial society in which society switched from a goods producing industry to a service economy. With the end of the individual and the “bourgeois ego,” this came the end of individualism, “of style, in the sense of the unique and the personal, the end of the distinctive individual brushstroke” (15). Furthermore Jameson claims that postmodern art lacks the feelings and emotion that embodied modern art- anxiety for one. According to Jameson, he believes “the liberation from the older anomie of the centered subject may also mean not merely a liberation form anxiety but a liberation form every other kind of feeling as well, since there is no longer a self present to do the feeling” (15). Post modern art lacks the individuality and meaning that modern art created. On the other hand, postmodern art is playful, uses pastiche, and lacks critical distance. Basically, it is a fragmentation of a subject. Artists like Andy Warhol use this technique, it can be seen in the painting, “Diamond Dust Shoes,” as Jameson argues that there is no subjectivity and thus the meaning is lost.

Jameson maintains that modern art exemplifies four models of depth whereas postmodern art represents three models of depthless ness. The four models of depth include essence and appearance, Freud’s structure of consciousness, existentialism, and structuralism, while on the other hand, postmodern art consists of three models of depthless ness: lack of subjective depth, simulacra, and schizophrenia.