![]() Photographs - even huge billboards - showing people dying of AIDS or waiting to be executed - designed to sell woolly jumpers. Why should 5000 murders change the meaning of meaning?Ī hyper-fashionable Italian clothing company uses death to sell its products. Last week all meanings could be expressed in terms of money. Awake but confused by a crisis of meaning. Schoolchildren (again according to the Times) ask their teachers what it means that the terrorists were willing to die, to kill themselves and their teachers evade the question, saying that “we don’t understand.” And the ad execs, they don’t understand either - they’re bewildered. But what exactly is this normal life to consist of? Why do we feel this shame? Our leaders are telling us to return to normal routines (after a decent period of mourning) in the assurance that they will assign significance to the event, they will embody our hate & desire for revenge, they will mediate for us with the forces of “evil”. The fashion industry is also ashamed Hollywood is ashamed even the news media expressed some fleeting longing for decorum & dignity & decency.Īre we supposed to feel this shame over our triviality, our mean-spiritedness, our PoMo irony, our consumer frenzy, our hatred of the body and of all nature, our obsession with gadgetry & “information”, our degraded pop culture, our vapid or morbid art & lit, & so on & so on? - or should we defend all this as “freedom” and our “way of life”? ![]() In a Times interview a fashion designer expressed doubt that her work had any significance and wondered if she could go with it. Last week, it seems we were willing to admit that our highest social values could be expressed in price codes (the “mark of the Beast” as the cranks say, the “prophets of doom”). Why hasn’t advertising ever seemed shameful to anyone ever before? The media - which cannot utter a sound without puking up a cliché - speaks now of the waking of a sleeping giant (meaning that we will no longer terrorism etc.) - but what was this sleep? And what does it mean to wake into a feeling of shame? It seems massively “inappropriate” to move product as per usual with shrieking & insinuating, mocking & sneering, prurience & peeping with hate & envy masked as fashion, with greed thinly disguised as freedom of choice.ĭeath and tragedy occur every day, every minute, not only in the former Third World, even in New York, even in America. ![]() ![]() etc., but a weird effect: suddenly it seems impossible to have advertising at all. 15th and this piece was written in the week after the attack.Ī few days after the event, the New York Times ran an interesting article on the advertising “industry” and its crisis. ![]()
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