What would Fredric Jameson say about the following image:
http://www.funnyphotos.net.au/images/mona-lisa-on-the-simpsons1.jpg
Jameson would say that this picture of an older Lisa Simpson substituting for the woman in the classical Mona Lisa painting is a perfect example of postmodernism. It makes fun of classic 'high culture', merging it with popular culture and thereby elevating popular culture, as here represented by a female member of of a dysfunctional, working class, TV family. In Jameson's words, the picture can be said to represent 'the effacement...of the older...frontier between high culture and so-called mass or commercial culture and the emergence of new kinds of texts infused with the forms...and contents of that very culture industry [TV, for example] so passionatelely denounced by all the ideologues of the modern..." (Jameson 2). Artworks like the Mona Lisa that have been considered high art are now viewed "as a set of dead classics" (Jameson 4). Jameson goes on to say that while this sort of postmodernism and "complacent (yet delilrious) camp-following celebration...is surely unacceptable" -- at some level we still emotionally reject the degradation of a classic work of art -- we must still "reject moralising condemnations of the postmodern "when it's compared with the equally ridiculous 'high seriousness' of the great modernisms'" (Jameson 6). The postmodern challenges our conceptions, and while it may sometimes make us uncomfortable, we also realize (and laugh at) the truth in that challenge.
Jameson might also observe that this picture is postmodern because it puts on display for both admiration and ridicule a TV example of the latest and most current form of capitalism: an ugly, homogenized city like the Springfield of The Simpsons, with its visible and generic 'Bowlarama', and the Simpson family, who spend their time trapped in American working class conditions and roles as they watch TV, drink (Homer, at least), fight with each other and scheme for a way out of their social and economic constraints.
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