From the 1940s to the '60s and beyond, "high" art took a back seat to "low"/popular culture, and the critic's voice was often drowned out when a box office hit could survive even the most scathing of critics. The Beatles, Andy Warhol, graffiti art, rap poetry, tacky Japanese horror flicks, and romance novels thrived due to overwhelming popular, if not always critical, demand. And our pomo culture is an omnivorous beast--just as we have an unlimited choice of cuisines from haute French to McDonalds, each individual can devour both low culture and high alike in one sitting--perhaps an appetizer of Godilla vs. Mothra followed by a main entrée of The 400 Blows - depending on individual appetites and media availability.

The latter, in turn, is now limited only by the vagaries of technological glitches and personal preference--one's computer crashes, there's "nothing" on TV, the video store didn't have the movie one coveted, one wants to stay home and veg out on Saturday night. But as the technology continues to refine itself, these obstacles become more and more infrequent. Computer technology is now much more bug-proof, and one can always put on a DVD if nothing's on cable or have a movie and dinner delivered courtesy of Netflix and the local pizzeria's website without leaving one's couch.

In fact, we have become so "at one" with our technologies that we are dependent on them in the same measure as we now take their presence for granted. A blackout can induce near-psychosis due to "sensory deprivation;" lost files can mean one has to start one's novel over from scratch; and any interruption or slowdown of internet accessibility can paralyze a corporation or an individual in a flash.

The "death" of the "Artist"

One lit crit movement of the modern elite/intelligensia did portend pomo's imminent reign. The French structuralists and deconstructionists of the '70s (when modernism was on the wane) working chiefly in the realm of lit crit, began to separate the art from the artist, and the text from the writer in a dispassionate, sometimes irreverent fashion. A text might be picked apart or dissected to examine its internal contradictions or self-referents - in a kind of literary psychoanalysis of the art text itself, divorced in some part from its creator. The writer lost "ownership" of his or her work as soon as this mostly French critical coterie got a hold of it, for they could interpret a text beyond the purview of what an author had, at least consciously, intended to say.

A personal example might be relevant here. I had a very tough time "getting" structuralism and deconstruction in grad school, until I began to discover the joys of metacriticism. Not that I labeled it as such at the time, but I became fascinated with the way in which writers might refer to the act of writing itself, or unwittingly lay bare some deeply personal obsession via their novels. Indeed, one of the hallmarks of pomo, as I finally realized, was the transparency of the means of production.