mandated by a carefully structured work. Not surprisingly, the hierarchical ranking between complex meaningful works and more accessible ones, that is to say between high art and low art, also flattened under the weight of all these connotative influences. High art in particular became to be seen as a power play by the elite to endow their personal values and tastes with universal significance. No works could any longer be said to possess some transcendental creative Geist in their core. How good or valuable anything is essentially became a matter of local culture and personal taste. All texts, good and bad, were basically equal and could be appreciated as mere cultural documents, crisscrossing scores of other texts, famous or mediocre, past and present. Casting and recasting different webs between a myriad of texts became far more exciting than analyzing the limited viewpoint of a single author or the attempt by one work to control meaning through its structural unity. In the long run then, semiotics (as used by the post-structuralists) thoroughly subverted our access to a stable referential world, the certainty of meaning, the intrinsic value of high art, and the importance of an artist working in isolation from the utilitarian interests of most people.
XVI
Post-modernism was just plain fun, at least at the beginning. Its spirit made it possible to dismantle the boundaries that carefully contained and defined fields of investigation in theory as well as in practice. Barthes could talk about wrestling, Foucault about insane asylums. The field of critical studies exploded, opening the way to fresh writing about film. And in the cinema itself, Dusan Makavejev (to take a single example) was able to crosscut through disparate film sources to come up with his tour de force, Innocence Unprotected (1968). With time though, some other aspects of the cultural revolution came more sharply into view. Most importantly, it became clear that modern art was not the only victim of the revisionist attack, art tout court was. For, beyond the ideas that art could be created and displayed in the most unusual places, postmodernism also embraced the notion of the artist as some kind of public entertainer.
Although artists had worked under conditions that alienated them from the rest of society, this exclusion had for the most part benefited them. Their very opposition to the social system had in fact infused them
