What We Have

David Bromwich

  • The Origins of Postmodernity by Perry Anderson
    Verso, 143 pp, £11.00, September 1998, ISBN 1 85984 222 4
  • The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-98 by Frederic Jameson
    Verso, 206 pp, £11.00, September 1998, ISBN 1 85984 182 1

Post-Modernism entered the public mind as a fast-value currency in the late Seventies and early Eighties, in the field of architecture, where its association with gimmicky tropes of visual play (the logo-in-the-sky of the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco, the phonejack-in-the-sky of the AT–T Building in New York) gave plausibility to the promotional prose. AT–T was the work of Philip Johnson, the friend of Andy Warhol, and so the publicity came with a background story ready to hand. The Post-Modern would be the art-historical movement that went beyond art by stopping short of art. Where Modernism was enchanted by affinities with the art of the past, and offered itself as a climactic annunciation, Post-Modernism would be ‘traditionalesque’: a little of this tradition, a little of that, whatever pleases the eye (but not too demandingly), or diverts the mind (but not into thought).

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Vol. 21 No. 3 · 4 February 1999 » David Bromwich » What We Have (print version)
Pages 16-18 | 4287 words