Public art absorbed taboo content in a successive widening of transgressions through the sixties

Evidence

Blue Velvet, indeed, tries to place sadomasochism squarely on the mass-cultural map with an earnestness altogether lacking in the Demme movie (whose handcuff love scene is as sexy as it is “frivolous”). S&M thus becomes the latest and the last in the long line of those taboo forms of content which, beginning with Nabokov’s nymphets in the 1950s, rise one after the other to the surface of public art in that successive and even progressive widening of transgressions which we once called the counterculture, or the sixties. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 642

Categorization

• XREF: Narrates the counterculture as a sequence of taboo-tolerances, which bears directly on the reader’s distinction between parody (transgressive, referential) and pastiche (blank, de-historicized). — connects to: Mass culture has absorbed the erotic outsiders who once provided irregular bliss; Art capitulates when it purges all trace of its pre-artistic, vulgar roots — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2721; The 1960s revolts linked workplace exploitation to cultural and creative stifling — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 438 (+3 more)
• QUESTION: Does the ‘progressive widening of transgressions’ imply postmodernism inherited but flattened what the counterculture escalated?