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Featherstone isolates three aspects of the postmodern aestheticization of daily life: <\/p>\n
1) Artistic movements such as Dada and Surrealism attempt to break down the boundary between art and daily life by turning toilets and such into art objects. This is both an attempt to \u201cdissemble [art\u2019s] sacred halo and challenge its respectable location\u201d and also a sense that art could be found anywhere, in the \u201cdetritus of mass culture, the debased consumer commodities,\u201d and even in \u201canti-work.\u201d <\/p>\n
2) Bohemian movements attempted to treat life as an artistic project. Oscar Wilde\u2019s ideal man attempts to \u201crealize himself in many forms, and by a thousand different ways, and will be curious of new sensations.\u201d Featherstone finds continuities between \u201cWilde, Moore and the Bloomsbury Group, and the writings of Rorty whose criteria for the good life revolve around the desire to enlarge one\u2019s self, the quest for new tastes and sensations, to explore more and more possibilities.\u201d <\/p>\n
3) Through advertising and other industries, the world is saturated with signs and images. Consumer society \u201cconfronts people with dream-images which speak to desires, and aestheticize and derealize reality.\u201d Baudrillard defines postmodern culture in this way, as the simulational world, as a world in which reality and image have become indistinguishable. Both art and the real end, absorbed in hyperrealism. As Baudrillard says, \u201cart is everywhere, since artifice is at the very heart of reality. And so art is dead, not only because its critical transcendence is gone, but because reality itself, entirely impregnated by an aesthetic which is inseparable from its own structure, has been confused with its own image.\u201d <\/p>\n
Citing Scott Lash\u2019s work, Featherstone suggests that postmodern culture is marked by a reversal of modern \u201cdifferentiation\u201d (Weber) and a triumph of the figural, which is found in film, TV, and advertising but also dominates consumer culture as such. Featherstone suggests that this figurality \u201cmay have its origins in the growth of consumer culture in the big cities of nineteenth-century capitalist societies, which became the sites for the intoxicating dream-worlds, the constantly changing flow of commodities, images and bodies (the flaneur <\/em> ). In addition those big cities were the sites of the artistic and intellectual subcultures, the bohemias and artistic avant-gardes, members of whom became fascinated and sought to capture in various media the range of new sensations, and who also acted as intermediaries in stimulating, formulating and disseminating these sensibilities to wider audiences and publics.\u201d <\/p>\n Thus, \u201cmany of the features associated with the postmodern aestheticization of everyday life have a basis in modernity. The predominance of images, liminality, the vivid intensities characteristic of the perceptions of churldren, those recovering from illness, schizophrenics and others, and figural regimes of signification can all be said to have parallels in the experiences of modernite as described by Baudelaire, Benjamin and Simmel.\u201d Late twentieth-century \u201cspectacles and simulated environements in malls, shopping centres, department stores, theme parks, \u2018Disneyworlds,\u2019 etc . . . ., which have many features in common with the department stores, arcades, world fairs, etc. describe by Benjamin and Simmel and others.\u201d Featherstone mentions the Paris Exhibition of 1900, which included \u201can exotic Indian landscape with stuffed animals, treasures and merchandise; an exhibit representing Andalucian Spain at the times of the Moors with simulated interiors and courtyards; a Trans-Siberian panorama which placed spectatores in a real railway car which moves along a track, while a canvas was unrolled outside the window to give an impression of Siberia.\u201d <\/p>\n He even suggests that similar experiences were available already in \u201cthe carnival of the middle ages,\u201d which was also marked by a \u201cdisconnected succession of fleeting images, sensations, de-control of the emotions and de-differentiation which have become associated with postmodernism and the aestheticization of everyday life.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Featherstone isolates three aspects of the postmodern aestheticization of daily life: 1) Artistic movements such as Dada and Surrealism attempt to break down the boundary between art and daily life by turning toilets and such into art objects. This is both an attempt to \u201cdissemble [art\u2019s] sacred halo and challenge its respectable location\u201d and also […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3021,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1862","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history"],"yoast_head":"\n