Distinct Lack of Naked Ladies!

This is the 3rd time I've purchased "the Anti-Aesthetic, essays on Post-Modern Culture." Each teacher has wanted us to read different essays, though, so I had not read Jameson's "Post-Modernism and Consumer Society." The thing that stood out about it most, upon first reading, was that it didn't contain any naked ladies.

mod·ern·ism/ˈmädərˌnizəm/Noun
1. Modern character or quality of thought, expression, or technique.
2. A style or movement in the arts that aims to break with classical and traditional forms.

post·mod·ern·ism/ noun /pōstˈmädərˌnizəm/

1. A late 20th-century style and concept in the arts, architecture, and criticism that represents a departure from modernism and has at its heart a general distrust of grand theories and ideologies as well as a problematical relationship with any notion of “art.”

So, as a historian (haha) I object to the whole progressive concept of modernism. There were so many breaks from so many different time periods in artistic history I think it's just sort of dumb to think of one of them as being more radical than the others. I don't get how modernism is more modern than, say, impressionism, except for its existance in more "modern" times. It just seems sorta silly to me as a name. So postmodernism seems, well, outright ridiculous. Which I guess is right there in the definition- "a general distrust of theories."

Specifically in this essay Jameson deals with "pastiche" and "schizophrenic" theories in postmodernism. He basically defines pastiche as parody without the comedy, (which sounds tedious), and schizophrenia as being something akin to the experience of Billy Pilgrim's becoming unstuck in time. If I'm understanding him correctly, and I very well may not be, his definition of postmodern art is art which evokes a sense of time (place, action) we can't quite put our finger on, yet we sense it's familiarity. In other words, postmodernism is that creepy sense of de ja vu that apparently occurs more regularly in epileptics. Saturated with time and signifiers but only conscious for, and in, an instant.

I don't understand why these labels and time periods need to be differentiated, or why they couldn't exist contemporary with each other, as schools of thought not periods of time. Actually, I'm quite sure that they did, along with neo-classicism and a whole bunch of other made up genres.

It has been hammered home in all these other naked lady essays that one of the great works of modernism, Demoiselles De Avignon, was an attempt to return to a primal, pre-classical aesthetic. So perhaps postmodernism is really just calling a spade a spade- saying that all works of modernism were indeed, already, postmodern. Wouldn't that be pre-modern? Let's just say it's all garbage and be done with it!

This goes back to the first mini- essay I wrote, where Linda Nochlin observed that the women of different eras were more likely to make work of that era rather than work that was distinctly feminine. It seems to me that one could postulate that artists were almost exclusively, throughout time, making work for the same fundamental reasons- they were capable through access to materials, they were being paid or in some way rewarded for their talents, and the work that they were making interested them. This has never changed, from neadrathal through neo-classical times. Artists will make representations of the fundamental things of importance in their times and space. Sometimes these things will deliberately be nostalgic, sometimes deliberately futuristic, for as long as there is a concept of past and future. Bu they will always be of their time. You can't change a Roman copy into a Greek original.