Obi wan kenobi ' s role was offered to Toshiro Mifune but he turned it down on advice from his agent . That would have been awesome , and probably would have had an interesting impact on the history of race relations and media representation . Western postmodernism was a reaction to the defeat of modernism , which could not overcome commercial , entertaining kitsch , but after World War II was , on the contrary , increasingly integrated into the single stream of commercial art controlled by the demands of the market . It was this circumstance that prompted many artists to undertake a skeptical revaluation of values and renounce the modernists ' totalitarian claims that they represented a chosen elite and new priesthood . These pretensions have now been succeeded by others , as individual creation is repudiated in favor of quotation and ironical play with the extant forms of commercial culture . Does anyone have an idea for the reason for this ? What was it exactly that struck against the urge for honesty in art in favor of appropriation , spectacle quotation and irony ?