I see MTV as the leading cultural indicator in America today - a sort of hyperspeed barometer of what's hip in film theory. And the trend seems to be toward postmodernism. The illusion doesn't fool us anymore; as a popular Sprite ad states flatly, "this i s just a jingle, and it doesn't mean anything."

That's postmodernism, baby - it's a pretty simple concept, usually disguised in complex and specialized language to make it inaccessible to those outside of academia. A lot of cultural pundits (like me) tend to throw it around to make themselves sound imp ortant.

Basically, postmodernism is when the people who create art and culture give up on the illusion of reality. KFMA 92.1 (especially Chuck Roast) is a perfect example - they still play Bush, but they let you know that they're not happy about it. Compare that to any other radio station, where they either pretend they love Hootie and the Blowfish, or act indifferently towards it.

But MTV is where it gets really cool, 'cuz the music video channel is where young, clever directors can get the funding they need to make really interesting works of art. Sure, they're essentially commercials for a band, but that's OK - the commercials on television have long been the most artistic works our culture can create.

Am I wrong? Have you seen the new Nike campaign? Yet the artists behind these commercial masterpieces have always worked in anonymity, except for the magical time of year when the Cleo awards roll around. Who creates the Little Caesar's commercials?

It was a huge, epistemological shift when MTV started adding the directors' names to the info provided about the song - creating a new celebrity class of video director. Spike Jonez, the first of the video auteurs, didn't have to toil away in relative obs curity working for an ad agency. Now he has a feature film deal and has turned the reigns over to Roman Coppola, son of the famous director and creator of the new set of Presidents of the USA videos.

Now that we know who creates these videos, the film school graduate directors can stand up and be recognized by the average teen. These guys all studied film theory at the NYUs and UCLAs of the world. Collectively, they're breaking down the fourth barrier of the set in America's most popular art-film outlet, as previously envisioned by Berthold Brecht, 1930s expressionist playwright and creator of the "Three Penny Opera." How's that for a cheesy, high-culture reference? Oh, the horror ...

But I really am trying to make a point here. Robert Smith gets up and leaves the set in the new Cure video. The Presidents of the USA turn on the lights on the sound stage, revealing that the beach and campfire are just artificial creations for the benefi t of the audience. And, the camera in Weezer's video veers around as they stop playing, and one can see the whole set as dogs run across the stage in slow motion.

You never would've seen that in a video of yesteryear - music videos have always been shot on stages, but only recently do you actually see them for the staged acts that they are. That's what I mean by "fourth barrier." You've got the barriers on the righ t, left, and back of the set ... but the barrier between the camera and set is almost never broken. Unless, I guess, you're watching a rerun of the Gary Shandling show. Videos now know that they're nothing more than just videos - they no longer try to pre tend.

This isn't the only form of postmodernism - quoting old films and putting them in new context is a big part of the theory. As much as I despise Billy Corgan's whiny squeal, whoever does the Smashing Pumpkins videos is obviously tuned in to this. Their new video is basically a send-up of one of the first special effects extravaganzas - George Melies' famous "Trip to the Moon." Maybe it's a joke that only film geeks and media arts majors get, but that's pretty hip these days - look what it's done for Quenti n Tarantino's career trajectory.

Beck, the master of recontextualization and collage in music, proves that you've got to have a soul to make it sound right; it's gotta come from the heart. Anyone looking for a truly disastrous experiment with film school textbook postmodernism needs to l ook no further than Greg Araki's "The Doom Generation." Wait, scratch that ... don't watch that movie. It was so awful, so painfully clich­d, that it sent my mind into a terrifying funk, leaving me unable to indulge in pop culture for weeks.

So, back to MTV for a minute - is it art? That's the big question, isn't it? I believe that it is. That doesn't mean that it's all great and I love it all, but one has to differentiate between the good art/bad art and the "anything popular isn't art" crit eria of the high-art folks. Whatever. They can keep their NEA-funded Karen Finley performance art pieces ... I want my MTV. Capitalism and art mix well, and I think we're going to witness a new explosion of great new videos when M2, MTV's new all-video ch annel, launches sometime in August. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, is a lot of time to run four-minute videos, and video directors will have to get increasingly more sophisticated and clever to capture an audience that has 500 other channels to choose from.

Directors, young, eager and fresh out of film school, will continue to use postmodernism as a framework to create and criticize the video medium, but they've got to do it with a soul or end up in some kind of self-parody hell, like Vanilla Ice.