Malls and the Art-World: Postmodernism and the Vicissitudes of Consumer Culture
Abstract
By now it is clear that the word postmodern has a settled into an insurmountable usage in the field of architecture and this in addition to its continuing currency for art critics and theorists, social analysts, and political and literary theorists, not to mention journalists and philosophers. Nevertheless no one less influential for the real or built presence of postmodernism than Charles Jencks could complain that with respect to architecture, critics apply the term as a kind of catchall, so that postmodernism is used for "everything that was different from high modernism, and usually this meant skyscrapers with funny shapes, brash colors, and exposed technology."1.