Would the last postmodernist please turn out the lights?

“In the end, consumer and celebrity culture defeated postmodernism by embracing it. When everything is ironic, nothing is ironic. If the movement was born on March 15th, 1972, it surely died on November 11th, 2011, when our very own Nama sold Andy Warhol’s silkscreen painting Dollar Sign in New York, having taken it from the property developer Derek Quinlan in lieu of unpaid debts. The Dollar Sign paintings were classic postmodern statements of the irony of a consumer aesthetic in which what we see in a work of art is the money it’s worth. Where’s the room for irony when the possession of such an image is embraced by one of the Celtic Tiger’s poster boys as a sign of his arrival?” Fintan O’Toole passing judgement.

Mon 26 Mar 2012 at 20:07   ·