The American culture-industry of image-making; part III

Abstract

This special issue covers the late history of the American culture-industry of image-making from the 1950s to the 1990s. It tries to find alternative ways of imagining the dialectical relationship of modernism and postmodernism to the intensification of multinational capitalism. Its attempt to reconsider the transition from modernity to postmodernity in both spatial and temporal terms enables the exploration of the gap between self-positioning before the marketplace and aesthetic self-presentation. By revisiting the modern and the postmodern in the aftermath of critical and cultural theory, Simon Critchley's and Allan Lloyd- Smith's essays explore the different ways in which aesthetic discourse can be philosophically informed by becoming the theory of a particular modernist or postmodernist practice. Their examination, oscillating between optimism and pessimism, proves the aesthetic heterogeneity of the American culture-industry through which this special issue endeavours to arrive at a historical understanding of image-making.