Saved from Drowning.(Donald Barthelme's "Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning" and other works)

In the spring of 1983, Donald Barthelme invited about twenty people to dinner at a restaurant in SoHo. The guest list included Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, William Gaddis, Robert Coover, John Hawkes, William Gass, Kurt Vonnegut, Walter Abish, and Susan Sontag. All of them turned up except Pynchon, who was out of the state and sent his regrets, and the writers made short speeches about their work and toasted their friendship. The affair became known as the Postmodernists Dinner.

As with many occasions organized to celebrate accomplishment, the mood was valedictory. In the nineteen-sixties, most of those writers had been turning the world of American fiction on its head; in the nineteen-eighties, they were the subjects of doctoral dissertations. They had become aldermen of the towns they once set out to burn down. They had also fallen out of step. The action in American fiction after 1975 no longer involved experimentalism and mixed media; it involved minimalism and a kind of straightforward realism that many of the people in the room probably thought they had left for dead long before. Barthelme himself, though he was only fifty-two, had already begun to withdraw from the literary scene. No one has a richer appreciation of the way the big wheel keeps on turning than a postmodernist, but some of the writers may have wondered, while the glasses were being refilled, what it had all been about.

Postmodernism is the Swiss Army knife of critical concepts. It's definitionally overloaded, and it can do almost any job you need done. This is partly because, like many terms that begin with "post," it is fundamentally ambidextrous. Postmodernism can mean, "We're all modernists now. Modernism has won." Or it can mean, "No one can be a modernist anymore. Modernism is over." People who use "postmodernism" in the first, "mission accomplished," sense believe that modernism--the art and literature associated with figures like Picasso and Joyce--changed the game completely, and that everyone is still working through the consequences. Modernism is the song that never ends. Being postmodernist just means that we can never be pre-modernist again. People who use it in the second sense, as the epitaph for modernism, think that, somewhere along the line, there was a break with the assumptions, practices, and ambitions of modernist art and literature, and that everyone since then is (or ought to be) on to something very different. Being postmodernist means that we can never be modernist again.

How (in the first account) did people like Picasso and Joyce change the game? They did it by shifting interest from the what to the how of art, from the things represented in a painting or a novel to the business of representation itself. Modern art didn't abandon the world, but it made art-making part of the subject matter of art. When (in the second account) did a break occur? It happened when artists and intellectuals stopped respecting a bright-line distinction between high art and commercial culture. Modernist art and literature, in this version of the story, depended on that distinction to give its products critical authority. Modernism was formally difficult and intellectually challenging. Its thrills were not cheap. But there were cheap thrills out there, a vast and growing mass of products manufactured to stroke the senses and flatter the self-images of their consumers. This bubble-gum culture wasn't just averse to the spirit of high art. It was high art's reason for being.

It's sometimes said that the distinction between high and commercial culture collapsed when artists and intellectuals discovered aesthetic merit in things like jazz and the movies. But this can't have been the case, because the idea of aesthetic merit--the belief that some works, for assignable reasons, have it and some works do not--is what kept the distinction alive in the first place. If you propose to admire a popular movie because it's formally interesting or morally exigent, you aren't changing the system of appreciation at all. There may be some new stuff above the line, but there is still a line. What killed the distinction wasn't defining pop art up. It was defining high art down. It was the recognition that serious art, too, is produced and consumed in a marketplace. The point of Warhol's Campbell's soup-can paintings was not that a soup can is like a work of art. It was that a work of art is like a soup can: they are both commodities.

This calling into question, problematizing, deconstructing--whatever you want to call it--of the status of art is what makes a lot of people uncomfortable with postmodernism in the second sense. They don't see that sort of postmodernism as demystifying; they see it as debunking. High art and literature have always been stimulated by popular sources (and have given stimulus back); and anti-art, art that thumbs its nose at aesthetic decorum, has an honored place in the modernist tradition. Duchamp and the Dadaists were making anti-art almost a hundred years ago. But you can make anti-art--Duchamp's "Fountain," for example--only when everyone still has some conception of authentic, stand-alone, for-its-own-sake art. Warhol's work is not anti-art. Finding no quality on which to hang a distinction between authentic art and everything else, it simply drops the whole question.

Donald Barthelme moved to New York City in 1962, the year that Warhol first showed the soup-can paintings. He came in order to take a job as the managing editor of an avant-garde arts magazine called Location, and, soon after he arrived, he published a story, in the literary magazine Contact, called "The Viennese Opera Ball." The story ends as follows: