Metaphors of the market: Postmodern commerce, postmodern art

Organized around the emblematic figures of Oscar Wilde and Andy Warhol, this dissertation examines aesthetic form in the compromised scene of postmodernity. As materialist thinkers have demonstrated, postmodern pastiche or citationality responds not only to the experimental novelties of an institutionalized modernism, but also to the shifting economic situation of multinational corporations and global capital. In Fredric Jameson's memorable formulation, postmodernism can be described as "the cultural logic of late capitalism," a signifying structure suited to an expanding commodity culture. Under this new regime, previously "radical" spaces like industrial production, subjectivity, or art become integrated into a general style, hermeneutical depth displaced by means of a rampant fetishism. Where modernist representation supplanted reality with a metphorically "other" world, one both capturing prevailing conditions and positing their undoing, postmodern forms simply adorn reality, duplicating a growing marketplace through metaphors indistinguishable from advertising and commodification.;Using the examples of Wilde and Warhol throughout, the essays in this project delineate the possibilities of an aesthetic emerging from but irreducible to the commodity form: metaphors, not metonyms, of the market. Part One ("Wilde"), examines the congruence of gay male aestheticism and sexuality with commodification, citing Wilde's epigrammatic inversions and the language of Salome as evidence of a decorative art which fails to provide a narrative for consumer use or value. Like a camp gesture, Wilde's decoration proffers artifice and design in place of function or action. Part Two ("Warhol") focuses on the types of narrative made available by this decorative aesthetic, reading Warhol's penchant for shopping against the artist's reception by the critical community. Highlighting labels in place of metaphoric combinations, Warhol creates lists and inventories rather that progressive narratives. Part Three ("Weimar") reads the political ramifications of these stalled stories, detailing two contemporary forms (stars and accessories) which, like Wilde and Warhol, depend upon decoration and display in place of narrative movement and resolution. Against the legacy of fascist aesthetics (a politics, not unlike the problem postmodernism, made into an art), the final essays argue for decoration as a renewed aestheticism which counters the dangerous conflation of art, narrative idealism, and everyday life.