A Damien Hirst shark floating in a tank of formaldehyde, a Jennie Holzer “truism” posted on a billboard in Times Square, a Thomas Ruff digital photograph of an urban forest – how can these diverse works reflect the same postmodern aesthetic?

Perhaps they can’t. Distinct as postmodern art is from modern art, it is marked by pluralism, by concurrent rather than successive styles, concerns and media. Since its emergence in the early ’70s, postmodern art has attacked modern art’s emphasis on formalism and instead embraced narrative content, social commentary and cultural theory. Postmodern artists also challenged modernist ideas about originality, authorial voice and avant-gardism. Still, like modernism, postmodernism was inspired by seismic social and scientific shifts. Artists responded to the erosion of national boundaries by mass media and multinational corporations, the ascendancy of electronic and digital technologies and the failures of an industrial notion of “progress.”

Postmodern art often aims to dissolve the line between high and low culture. Jeff Koons’s kitsch ceramic sculpture Michael Jackson and Bubbles (1988) and Takashi Murakami’s Panda (2003), a manga-like fiberglass panda standing on a Luis Vuitton trunk, exemplify the appropriation of images, styles and strategies from popular culture. They also reveal postmodern art’s cheery embrace of late-capitalist consumerism.

Ironically, postmodern art is seen to be influenced by conceptualism, feminism and cultural theory; it is idea-driven and often aims to deconstruct the politics of representation and the biases of gender, culture, race and sexual orientation. “Cultural hybridity,” reflecting globalization, mass migration and displacement, is an important feature of the postmodern aesthetic. A positive aspect of postmodernism’s postcolonial condition is that artists in Asia, Africa and Latin America have rapidly emerged onto the world scene. Their absorption into the art market and their conversion into manufacturers of cultural products have been equally rapid.

Over the past few decades, postmodernism has been particularly well served by photography, video and other media-based art forms. A stellar example is the creative practice of Jeff Wall, whose staged photographs are charged with cultural, social and political references. In the late ’70s Wall borrowed a significant advertising form – large-scale, backlit, photographic transparencies in aluminum frames – for his narrative pictures. Inspiring other postmodern artists working in photo-based media, his photographs involve many of the techniques and strategies of commercial moviemaking: creating storyboards, scouting locations, building sets, hiring makeup artists and casting and directing actors.

Far from the Bohemian vision of a starving artist working alone in an unheated garret, leading contemporary artists (like Koons, Murakami, Zhang Yuan or Olafur Eliasson) often work out of factory-like studios and employ large numbers of assistants. Large-scale manufacture, extreme technical proficiency and a businesslike approach to image-making have all contributed defining aspects to a postmodern aesthetic. Strangely, the movement’s early concerns with social and environmental issues, including overconsumption, seem to have been sidelined.

Like most other late-capitalist enterprises, much postmodern art production is not sustainable in the long term. In opposition to the postmodern trend toward large, glossy and expensive production, many emerging and established artists are working with found and salvaged materials, discarded objects and even detritus in what could be seen as a “shabby” or “garbage” aesthetic. Although hardly a new strategy – much of what defines the new aesthetic has been developing for years – it draws attention to everyday waste and overconsumption.

British artist John Isaacs employs not scrap lumber or old paint cans, but wax and epoxy resin to create highly realistic sculptures. Often grisly and unsettling, they reflect the profound anxieties of our age. In another approach, artists are embracing a modest scale and old-fashioned media, such as drawing, painting, collage and fiber. Their humble, handmade creations suggest the emergence of a “kitchen table” sensibility. Raymond Pettibon, for example, is acclaimed for his cartoon-like ink drawings on paper, which are filled with social and political observations and quotes from literature and popular culture.

Ghada Amer represents a neo-feminist sensibility. Her work, which often consists of embroidered paintings, sculptures and installations, addresses the condition of women, including their sexuality and desire. Her canvases, their images and text embroidered in colored threads, also reveal the kind of gestural, abstract-expressionist painting that postmodernists long ago abandoned. This suggests that the individual “mark” is also part of the new aesthetic.

Rirkrit Tiravanija attempts to change the emphasis in art from the making of objects and their viewing within an institution to socializing and the sharing of experiences. These experiences often revolve around food, which the artist prepares and serves to his audiences – who are also participants in the creation of his art.

Although representative of an emerging aesthetic, these artists are already well known. Working outside the purview of curators and collectors, however, are legions of street artists whose impact is only now being felt. These are the artists whose political, social and environmental beliefs are temporarily communicated in alleys, vacant lots and abandoned telephone booths – through graffiti murals, urban “interventions,” posters, stickers ... and drawings dropped into the gutter. Again their strategies aren’t new, but they’ve taken on a new urgency in light of today’s economic and environmental crises.

The art market has been as voracious and as flawed as any other aspect of post-industrial capitalism and has co-opted even the most conceptual and anti-commercial works and movements. It’s obvious, for example, that Banksy’s street art loses its impact and credibility when displayed in an art gallery. If the new aesthetic is worth its apocalyptic salt, it will resist. It will.

Robin Laurence is a writer, critic and curator based in Vancouver. She is a Contributing Editor at Canadian Art and Border Crossings magazines and covers visual arts for Vancouver’s The Georgia Straight.