If you're still trying to get your head around the relationship of postmodern art to its predecessors, here's a word from Terry Eagleton about the response to modernism:
What is parodied by postmodernist culture, with its dissolution of art into the prevailing forms of commodity productions, is nothing less than the revolutionary art of the twentieth-century avant-garde.
Modernism is among other things a strategy whereby the work of art resists commodification, holds out by the skin of its teeth against those social forces which would degraded it to an exchangeable object.
Postmodernism, confronted with this situation, will then take the other way out. If the work of art really is a commodity then it might as well admit it, with all the sang froid it can muster. Rather than languish in some intolerable conflict between its material reality and its aesthetic structure, it can always collapse that conflict on one side, becoming aesthetically what it is economically. The modernist reification – the art work as isolated fetish – is therefore exchanged for the reification of everyday life in the capitalist marketplace. The commodity as mechanically reproducible exchange ousts the commodity as magical aura…. If the high modernist work has been institutionalized within the superstructure, postmodernist culture will react demonically to such elitism by installing itself within the base.
From Eagleton The Illusions of Postmodernism Oxford : Blackwell, 1996
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