| | | | | | democratization when he wrote that "the commercial character of culture causes the difference between culture and practical life to disappear. . . ." 68 At the very least, this meant that the representation of daily life could be homogenized. Everything could now be the same everywhere. Fredric Jameson describes the resulting culture as "the surrounding environment of philistinism, of schlock and kitsch, of TV series and Reader's Digest culture . . . that whole landscape of advertising and motels, of the Las Vegas strip, of the late show and Grade-B Hollywood film, of so-called paraliterature with its airport paperback categories. . . ."69 The "democratization" thus confirmed the view that there is only one "real" world and that all texts, regardless of their source, share the same views about it. What previously would have been recognized as art now vanishes into the thin air of the consumer culture. Even on a purely technical level, commercial art had no problem appropriating the most formidable redoubt of art: its formal avant-garde.70 That the superb imagery of rock videos fails to question reality in the way its prime movers, say, surrealism or expressionism, did, remains unimportant for an audience which has no memory or knowledge of these original movements. What matters here is that rock videos have preempted the need for a real avant-garde. A dose of MTV indeed fills up whatever urge one may have for a different sort of visual exploration. | | | | | | | | | The nonstop babble of the advertising industry, what Jean Renoir so judiciously called the "cancer" at the core of our society, our culture, our life, now fills the air free of interference.71 From park benches and city buses to magazine pages and television commercials, the culture industry surrounds its potential consumers with thousands of messages each day. It does not matter that such interpellations are nonthreatening or that people see through the ads. Ubiquity is the thing. Everywhere we turn, images confront us. Print and electronic pictures satiate our gaze, making it more difficult to create or even want to experience other images, images that could actually benefit our lives. The point of advertising indeed is less to sell this, now, to this person, than to occupy the subject's entire life. At no time should one be able to reflect on what the discourse of capitalism in fact excludes. For Madison Avenue, a fastidious nanny towering over us day and night, insists that she knows what is good for us, that all our | | | | |
