http://www.funnyphotos.net.au/images/mona-lisa-on-the-simpsons1.jpg

Frederic Jameson would have much to say on the subject of the above image in which the Mona Lisa is drawn as though a character of The Simpsons with the now culturally ubiquitous town of Springfield serving as the backdrop. There is no doubt that the image (and indeed the show) fit into the postmodern canon, although how exactly it goes about doing that would be the topic of a lengthy discussion on what constitutes postmodern as opposed to modern or any art. Jameson would probably start by speaking to the background from which the movement emerged.

“the last few years have been marked by an inverted millenarianism in which premonitions of the future, catastrophic or redemptive, have been replaced by sense of the end of this or that (the end of ideology, art, or social class; the “crisis” of Leninism, social democracy, or the welfare state, etc., etc.) Taken together, all of these perhaps constitute what is increasingly called postmodernism.”

According to Jameson, postmodernism is in many ways characterized by an underlying sense of the end being nigh. The world in which postmodernism, as opposed to modernism, has risen to prominence is one in which the downfall of man feels almost a tangible blip over the horizon and in many ways both acts as a criticism of and signifies the end of many facets of human achievement, including art.

“the enumeration of what follows, then, at once becomes empirical, chaotic, and heterogenous: Andy Warhol and pop art, but also photorealism, and beyond it, the “new expressionism”, the moemnt, in music, of John Cage, but also the synthesis of “classical” and “popular” styles found in composers like Phil Glass and Terry Riley, and also punk and new wave rock”

Perhaps, then, the superimposition of popular culture into classical themes such as this one speaks to postmodern playfulness, while the image's underlying humor can be seen as an expression of postmodernism's both reflective and pointedly cynical and stance on human development, what Jameson refers to as “inverted millenarianism.”

“Postmodernism in architecture will then logically enough state itself as a kind of aesthetic populism, as the very title of Venturi's influential manifesto, Learning from Las Vegas, suggests. However we may ultimately wish to evaluate this populist rhetoric, it has at leat the merit of drawing our attention to one fundamental feature of all the postmodernisms enumerated above: namely, the effacement in them of the older (essentially high-modernist) frontier between high culture and so-called mass commercial culture, and the emergence of new kinds of texts infused with the forms, categories, and contents of that very culture industry so passionately denounced by all the ideologues of the modern”

The image is also perhaps an example of postmodernism's destruction of the boundaries between high culture and commercial culture, this image going so far as to satirize said rift. The image and The Simpsons could be placed within either category of high or commercial culture, and in doing so inspires the new reading of the texts “denounced by all the ideologues of the modern.”

“One of the concerns frequently aroused by periodizing hypotheses is that these tend to obliterate difference and to project an idea of the historical period as massive homogeneity (bounded on either side by inexplicable chronological metamorphoses and punctuation marks). This is, however, precisely why it seems to me essential to grasp postmodernism not as a style but rather as a cultural dominant: a conception which allows for the presence and coexistence of a range of very different, yet subordinate, features.”A postmodern society is one in which all forms of culture are subjected to a self-perpetrating system by which every manufactured piece of art, regardless of intent or underlying meaning, even if that meaning is to distance itself from this very cycle, is swallowed into a vast, all encompassing cultural catalogue which absorbs and homogenizes the work. Everything produced within a postmodern society is a product, and as such is an extension of the progressively capitalistic western society from which it originated. Postmodern society is therefore society lacking perspective from which to judge itself. The image of the Mona Lisa is in this sense both a parody of postmodernism and a facet of the same dominant culture.