The postmodern present recasts all prior art as nostalgia and cultural stereotype

Evidence

With this modification of our focus on the landscape painting, we are already in the process of establishing some more scandalous and historicist link with the final item in the collection; namely, the virulent object from the present, the Richard Prince text, whose very enigmatic and “conceptual” structure at once announces the presence of the postmodern and transforms all three previous terms into nostalgia and Americana and unexpectedly projects them into a now distant past, about which not the least embarrassing question is whether, in full postmodernist late capitalism with its perpetual present and its multiple historical amnesias, it has itself any more genuine existence than that of a stereotype or a cultural fantasy. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 395

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The Richard Prince text retroactively turns every earlier artwork into ‘nostalgia and Americana’ — and the passage leaves open the genuinely unsettling doubt about whether the postmodern present itself has any more reality than the stereotype it manufactures. This is the periodizing, falsifiability-testing core.
• XREF: Coheres with the chapter’s running theme of historical amnesia and the perpetual present — connects forward to which aesthetic vocabulary the reader can summon for modern examples. — connects to: Postmodern nostalgia-laden films yearn for the present while rendering the actual past inaccessible. — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 158; Utopian impulses realize future projections disguised as nostalgia — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 299; Pervasive cultural nostalgia signals an inability to make new memories — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 249 (+3 more)
• QUESTION: If the postmodern present also exists only as stereotype, what is the status of any artwork produced within it — and does that make the ‘cultural dominant’ thesis immune to counterexample?