Postmodern art operates within media systems rather than unifying them into transcendent wholes

Evidence

Indeed, we may speak of spatialization here as the process whereby the traditional fine arts are mediatized: that is, they now come to consciousness of themselves as various media within a mediatic system in which their own internal production also constitutes a symbolic message and the taking of a position on the status of the medium in question. Gober’s installation — which includes what might once have been called painting, sculpture, writing, and even architecture — thus draws its effects from a place not above the media but within their system of relationships: something it seems better to characterize as a kind of reflexivity rather than the more conventional notion of “mixed media,” which normally implies the emergence of a kind of superproduct or transcendental object — the Gesamtkunstwerk — from this synthesis or combination. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 381

Categorization

• XREF: The mediatic-system framing of art’s reflexivity connects to the reader’s cognitive-map goal — it’s a concrete instance of how aesthetic form is the economy’s way of appearing. — connects to: Technology’s unification of all arts will expose the identity behind industrial culture; Postmodern art severs images from meaning into random nonrelational fragments — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 67; Technical perfection in postmodern film substitutes tactical values for meaning. — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 165 (+4 more)
• DEFINE: Distinguishes ‘reflexivity’ from ‘mixed media’/Gesamtkunstwerk — a key conceptual distinction for understanding postmodern spatialization.