The Pastiche of "Mona Lisa"

After looking at Matt Groening’s rendition of Leonardo DaVinci’s work, the “Mona Lisa”, I believe Frederic Jameson would say that this “painting” falls directly into the cultural trend of a postmodernistic work. Stemming from his work entitled “Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”, Jameson probably would have claimed that this piece of art is characterized by its pastiche and “a crisis in historicity”. Not only is the painting of the original “Mona Lisa” turned into a female from the show “The Simpsons”, but it also is replaced by pastiche instead of parody. The difference between the parody of the “Mona Lisa” and a pastiche of it lies in the fact that a parody requires “a moral judgment or comparison with societal norms”, and a pastiche is “a collage and other forms of juxtaposition without a normative grounding”. The crisis in historicity lies in the fact that Groening’s work merges all discourse into a whole, which is a result of the colonization of the cultural sphere.

Jameson would have also said that Groening’s “Mona Lisa” has an explicit formal and/or thematic choice of the writer and the unconscious framework that the author uses as a guideline. An artistic choice such as Groening’s used to be viewed in purely aesthetic terms, but now they can be recast in terms of historical literacy practices and norms in an attempt to “develop a systematic inventory of the constraints they imposed on the artist as an individual creative subject”.