Postmodern aesthetic forms lift and cancel their cheap commercial origins rather than transcending them.

Evidence

The immediate postwar heritage of this virtually natural or biological species protection has been the diversion of such aesthetic instincts (a very doubtful thing to call them) into instant commodification — fast foods, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the kitch interior decoration and furniture for which the United States is famous and which has been explained as a kind of security blanket — chintz of the first postwar domestic production — designed to ward off memories of the depression and its stark physical deprivations. But you can’t start again from scratch; and everything after that — in the so-called Postmodernism, long after the depression has been forgotten save as the pretext for Reagan’s comparison of himself with FDR — has had to build on those unpromising commercial beginnings. As though it had studied under Hegel, therefore, the postmodern lifts up, and cancels, all that junk (Aufhebung), including the hamburger within the diremption of its gourmet meals and Las Vegas within the rainbow-flavor landscape of its psychedelic corporate monuments. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 257

Categorization

• DEFINE: Concretely demonstrates the Hegelian Aufhebung at work in postmodern culture: the hamburger sublated within the gourmet meal, Las Vegas within psychedelic corporate monuments.
• ADDENDUM: The hamburger and Las Vegas as sublated junk connects directly to the grafting/narrative-metaphor frame in ‘Grafting & Growth’ — postmodern form grafts new meaning onto old commercial raw material.
• XREF: connects to: Contemporary creative identity no longer opposes commerce to art. — Brooke Erin Duffy, (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love:…, 739