Wolfe inhabited the undecidable cusp between modern and postmodern

Evidence

Wolfe goes on to produce a tongue-incheek list of sign styles, in tune with the light irony of this section of the essay: ”Boomerang Modern, Palette Curvilinear, Flash Gordon Ming- Alert Spiral, McDonald’s Hamburger Parabola, Mint Casino Elliptical, Miami Beach Kidney” (8). Venturi et al. quote this list verbatim as accurate description, with tongue in a highly ambiguous relation to cheek. Again, in Venturi’s postmodernity we are to learn, accept, and admire; not to judge. … For Wolfe, there is a continuity between the whimsical, imaginative, excessive, erudite, academic architecture of the scions of high modernism and the postmodern populist imaginative excessive whimsy of Las Vegas signs. Wolfe both asserts that continuity and mocks it, as he does in his comparison of slot-machine noise to a Cage symphony, by pointing to the absurdity of this juxtaposition of high art with the commercial vernacular at the same time that he invokes the universe of postmodern pastiche—the indifferentiated mixing, sampling, versioning of high and popular culture. — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited, 284

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Sixties texts are now dated precisely by straddling modern and postmodern paradigms — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 89; Thompson wrote Fear and Loathing as a sixties epitaph from an anti-Vegas stance. — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 310; Wolfe saw Vegas as corruption of modernism, not its repudiation — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 294 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Both Said and Wolfe retreat from analyzing underlying structures of thought #expands (0.78)
• Certain modernist precursors already contained what became postmodern #corroborates (0.72)