Музикалният видеоклип – метафора на постмодерната естетика?
Music Video – A Metaphor of Postmodern Aesthetics?

Summary/Abstract: Not long after the global expansion of specialized television channels like MTV (1981), many analysts identify music video as a metaphor of postmodernism (see for instance, Kaplan, 1987). Even though assuming the whole ambiguity of the term, one can still observe specific expressive aspects that are closely associated with what is considered to be “postmodern”, including in terms of euphoric affinity to repetition, fragmentation, non-linear sense of time, dynamic visual effects, notion of irony and carnival rhetoric. Drawing on Madonna’s music video Give It 2 Me (2008), seen as a particular illustration of such expressive traits , this article discusses on how the moving images refer to the logic of musical semantics. It is argued that unlike film music which usually illustrates the film narrative, the visual rhetoric in music video “serves” the music itself. In this sense, much of the presupposed postmodern expressiveness is stimulated by the very logic of the pop musical structures, tended to extremely developing over the last several decades rather a strong affinity to repetition and circle (non-linear) sense of time which creates an allusion for “no beginning and no ending”. As to the controversial reception of such developments, it is pointed out that this issue refers not only to the “objective” aesthetical qualities of any single artifact but rather to the complex process of self-identifying and to those social, cultural and psychological acquirements which respect the individual choice, free of any ideological dictates.

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