Postmodern Anxiety & the Aesthetics of Destruction Essay -- Aesthetics

Postmodern Anxiety & the Aesthetics of DestructionTo borrow a term from the seminal postmodern scholarship of Ihab Hassan, we are living in a moment of indeterminacy. As linearity went the itinerary of modernism, straightaways culture is maven of interconnectivity, webs and networks. We privilege teamwork, democracy, prosperous and equal access to knowledge above all in all else. Aesthetics of art and the rhetoric of corporation (that is in turn borrowed from delicious practices) are changing as a result. Formalism has given way to more open creativity. Companies are flat or horizontally-integrated, workers may point be skilled beyond menial tasks. But what gets lost in this tangled utopia of webs and equality is determinable truth. Because of the new corporate rhetoric its easy to forget that we are still undeniably situated in a hegemonic, global, (late-)capitalist culture. And although because of increases in technology, the general public has access to more knowledge than of all time before, with these advances also comes unparallel access to a proliferation of useless information. What results from this fetishizing of democratization on all fronts is a tension between revelation and concealment, sense and nonsense. The ethnic anxiety, which this in turn creates, has led the United States into a war against a faceless enemy for the second time in only a few decades. The indeterminate form of communism which we once fruitlessly battled has today taken on the amorphous visage of terrorism. Ultimately, this ideology of war, created by the uncomfortableness of a culture of indeterminacy, is just as transparent as the technological interfaces (computer and television screens) that its images are projected on. Current artistic practices mirror this war-motivati... .... 5 may 2005. Gibson, William. Introduction to Agrippa A Book of the Dead. . 5 May 2005. Hutcheon, Linda and Natoli, Joseph, eds. A Postmodern Reader . State University of New York Press . Albany 1993.Jeffords, Susan & Rabinovitz, Lauren ed. Seeing through with(predicate) the Media The Persian Gulf War. Rutgers University Press, New Jersey 1994.Metzger, Gustav. http//www.391.org/manifestos/1960metzger.htm 5 May 2005 Nike buys streets and squares rebel marketing or collective hallucination? 10 Oct. 2003. http//www.0100101110101101.org/texts/nike_prelease1-en.html. 5 May 2005. Websites Consulted 0100101110101101.org. http//www.0100101110101101.org 5 May 2005.Etoyhttp//www.etoy.com/ 5 May 2005 . Nikebiz.com http//www.nike.com/nikebiz/nikebiz.jhtml?page=0