Postmodern aesthetic practices respond to an environment of image-and-message saturation

Evidence

On the other hand, image-resistant themselves, the machines pour out a torrent of images, with whose volume no art can compete. The decisive technical environment of the postmodern is constituted by this ‘Niagara of visual gabble’. Since the seventies, the spread of second-order devices and positionings in so much aesthetic practice is comprehensible only in terms of this primary reality. But the latter, of course, is not simply a wave of images, but also — and above all — of messages. Marinetti or Tatlin could erect an ideology out of the mechanical, but most of the machines themselves said little. The new apparatuses, by contrast, are perpetual emotion machines, transmitting discourses that are wall-to-wall ideology, in the strong sense of the term. The intellectual atmosphere of postmodernism, as doxa rather than art, draws many of its impulses from the pressure of this sphere. For the postmodern is this too: an index of critical change in the relationship between advanced technology and the popular imaginary. — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 230

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Postmodern art operates within media systems rather than unifying them into transcendent wholes — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 381; Postmodern identity is shaped by constant media channel-switching rather than fixed subjectivity — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 796; Accelerated turnover transforms modernist aesthetics into postmodernist flux — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 940 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Postmodern identity is shaped by constant media channel-switching rather than fixed subjectivity #exemplifies (0.80) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 796
• Postmodern art operates within media systems rather than unifying them into transcendent wholes #expands (0.78) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 381
• Accelerated turnover transforms modernist aesthetics into postmodernist flux #expands (0.74) — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 940