This chapter explores one of the canonical works of high modernism in visual art, Van Gogh's well-known painting of the peasant shoes. High modernism is thus credited with the destruction of the fabric of traditional city and of its older neighbourhood culture; while the prophetic elitism and authoritarianism of the modern movement are remorselessly denounced in the imperious gesture of the charismatic Master. The chapter discusses postmodernism is inseparable from and unthinkable without the hypothesis of, some fundamental mutation of the sphere of culture in the world of late capitalism, which includes a momentous modification of its social function. Postmodernism in architecture will then logically enough stage itself as a kind of aesthetic populism, as the very title of Robert Venturi's influential manifesto, Learning from Las Vegas, suggests. The postmodern is, however, the force field in which very different kinds of cultural impulses what Raymond Williams has usefully termed residual and emergent forms of cultural production must make their way.