Books
Films
“ ‘. . . . The salad days of consumer-motivation research, when the great theorist Ernest Dichter, in the introduction to his seminal work The Strategy of Desire, could pose the question of whether or not it was ethical to wade into the human mind and implant never-before existent desires for unneeded products – only to respond wholeheartedly in the affirmative by wrapping himself in the flag.
‘In the Soviet Union, Dichter argued, advertising was every bit as prevalent as it was in America. The only difference was that the Soviets’ advertising campaigns were run by the government and called propaganda, whereas ours were called marketing and were run by private business. The purpose of propaganda, he went on to say, was to manipulate people into believing that all was as it should be; that the citizens had everything they could want; that they lived in a great country founded upon a great ideal; that their work was important; that their lives were meaningful. In short, propaganda strove to create contentment. The purpose of American-styel marketing, in contrast, was precisely the opposite. It existed to create discontent, to ensure that citizens were never happy with their lot, inciting them to crave more money, more property, newer cars, better clothing, better bodies, younger and more beautiful spouses. Thanks to marketing, American citizens were perpetually unsatisfied, goaded ever onward, ever forward, generating the American advantage, the drive that ensured progress, technological innovation, and a fully stimulated economy.’ ”
(Alex Shakar, The Savage Girl, pp. 136–7.)
“To learn that the government – using information that the law now requires be recorded on tape and stored indefinitely by banks, the telephone company, airlines, credit-card companies – can know more about me (my more sociable activities, anyway) than I do myself. If necessary, I could list most of the plane trips I’ve taken; and my old checkbook stubs are in a drawer – somewhere. But I don’t remember whom I telephoned exactly four months ago at 11 a.m., and never will. I don’t think it was Julia.”
(Susan Sontag, “Debriefing,” p. 46 in I, etcetera.)
Books
Films
“From this point of view, mannerism is the first modern style, the first which is concerned with a cultural problem and which regards the relationship between tradition and innovation as a problem to be solved by rational means. Tradition is here nothing but a bulwark against the all too violently approaching storms of the unfamiliar, an element which is felt to be a principle of life but also of destruction. It is impossible to understand mannerism if one does not grasp the fact that its imitation of classical models is an escape from the threatening chaos, and that the subjective overstraining of its forms is the expression of the fear that form might fail in the struggle with life and art fade into soulless beauty. “
(Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art, trans. Stanley Godman, vol. 2, pp. 100–1.)
“So it comes about that the effect of such a building is not merely not impaired when it is left uncompleted; its appeal and its power are actually increased. The inconclusiveness of the forms, which is characteristic of every dynamic style, gives emphasis to one’s impression of endless, restless movement for which any stationary equilibrium is merely provisional. The modern preference for the unfinished, the sketchy, and the fragmentary has its origin here. Since Gothic days all great art, with the exception of a few short-lived classicist movements, has something fragmentary about it, an inward or outward incompleteness, an unwillingness, whether conscious or unconscious, to utter the last word. There is always something left over for the spectator or the reader to complete. The modern artist shrinks from the last word, because he feels the inadequacy of all words – a feeling which we may say was never experienced by man before Gothic times.”
(Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art, trans. Stanley Godman, vol. 1, pp. 242–3.)
Films
Exhibits
Books
Films
Exhibits
“Once upon a time there was a woman who was just like all women. And she married a man who was just like all men. And they had some children who were just like all children. And it rained all day.
The woman had to skewer the hole in the kitchen sink, when it was blocked up.
The man went to the pub every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. The other nights he mended his broken bicycle, did the pool coupons, and longed for money and power.
The woman read love stories and longed for things to be different.
The children fought and yelled and played and had scabs on their knees.
In the end they all died.”
(Elizabeth Smart, The Assumption of the Rogues & Rascals, p. 81.)
“When Jericho fell, weeping was permitted, and in Babylon it was fashionable to make a memorable moan by the retreating waters. But here you must go to your office, looking spritely, with a sparkle even if synthetic in your eye. For who dares to stand up and say ‘We are weary! O Christ but we are weary!’ ”
(Elizabeth Smart, The Assumption of the Rogues & Rascals, p. 23.)