What is Postmodern Aesthetics?
Across fields of narrative, film, music, and architecture, there is a new sensibility. Hassard (1996) argues that postmodern organizations will adopt a less linear and more cyclical sense of time. For Baudrillard, the most radical of postmodernists, this is a society of the simulation. We simulate team meetings in virtual team meeting rooms on the Internet. We simulate organizations with “Virtual Organizations,” where a core of a few full time people with total benefits lord it over the part timers and net-slaves (those commuting to work through computer hookup) with no benefits at all. In this new postmodern culture, we see the architecture of Las Vegas replacing the city center and even the modernist shopping mall. In Las Vegas, simulated New York, simulated Pairs, and simulated Venice are supposed to be safer, cleaner, easier, and more user-friendly than the real places which are too rude, crude, nasty and brutish. Postmodern art and architecture is a shock to modernist sensibility
