Contemporary art of every kind is experienced only as reception, never as production

Evidence

There are, however, good reasons why these propositions about hints, anticipations, or symbolic experiences of nonalienated labor should no longer be persuasive. For one thing, the very experience of art itself today is alienated and made “other” and inaccessible to too many people to serve as a useful vehicle for their imaginative experience. This is so whether it is a question of high art or of mass culture; for in both cases, for very different reasons, the experience of the production of such art forms is inaccessible to most people (including critics and intellectuals), who thereby find themselves thrown back on an experience of both kinds of art as sheer reception (whence the attractiveness of those categories for contemporary theory). — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 353

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in distinguishing parody from pastiche and ‘waning of affect’ — the inaccessibility of artistic production helps explain why pastiche (imitation without originality) rather than parody becomes the dominant mode.