Commodity-foregrounding art fails to be political under late capital.

Evidence

Indeed, one is tempted to raise here — far too prematurely — one of the central issues about Postmodernism itself and its possible political dimensions: Andy Warhol’s work in fact turns centrally around commodification, and the great billboard images of the Coca-Cola bottle or the Campbell’s soup can, which explicitly foreground the commodity fetishism of a transition to late capital, ought to be powerful and critical political statements. If they are not that, then one would surely want to know why, and one would want to begin to wonder a little more seriously about the possibilities of political or critical art in the postmodern period of late capital. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 54

Categorization

• SEED: Article angle: why does foregrounding the commodity no longer read as critique — the collapse of the critical distance that made pop art political.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: what would make any art critical in the postmodern period, given culture itself is commodified?