a little truth to power

The pop culture hacker. Really a post-modern artist and a critic of capitalism, the entire apparatus of the Evil Empire in all its ugly glory and self rationalizations and justifications for the dirty deeds and power to make others do them for them. It targets the system somewhat like Theodor Adorno, how art and the original and authentic become B.S.’d down by Hollywood, this voracious machine that dumbs down everything  into easy to swallow entertainment.

A world where critical content is vampirized and sentimentalized into the Society of the Spectacle, the entertainment nature preserve we inhabit. It is the fate, America’s “manifest destiny” that Hollywood bestows on those critical of the Western military-industrial complex . Entertainment is basically controlled brain washing, with no tolerance for any form of consciousness willing to speak the truth to the power of the intrinsic flaw and self-absorbed absurdity. It make you wonder. When ancient Egypt was destroyed, where did all the slave masters and ruling classes disperse to?

Today’s pop culture hacker is a new/old phenomenon. You can look at Diogenes ridiculing Plato and Aristotle , Goya , Otto Dix, Toulouse Lautrec, John Heartfield, and so on producing art that contradicted the power structure by exposing contradictions; militarism., terror , trauma , those conditions that make society pursue pleasure that reinforce the psychosis they search to flee from. Our tendency is disavowal, to put lipstick on the pig and gussy into an inconsequential realm. The trope of maladjusted societal glamor. But the beast is to big, the elephant in the room to ensconced to move on. We are stuck with pop culture, the tail wagging the dog and there is not much to do except transform it from within and change the role whereby it is subservient to real and fundamental needs and desires. Or to create a template for a new secular side to society that will exist parallel or entirely supplant what the current fare offers which is basically “what the market will bear.” A situation which always tends to go the route of the slippery slope to perversity.

ADDENDUM:

Reproduction challenges and mocks the skill that went into its making — especially if it was made by hand and eye and not simply dependent on its concept and ideology for credibility — by implying that its own technology is superior to the techniques that inform the work’s artistry….

Reproduction trumps art by appropriating it wholesale — digesting it until it is a shadow of itself. Even in digital art the technology seems to usurp the place of the art. Reproduction levels its sensuality and weakens its emotional effect, subverting its vitalizing evocative power, and making it seem less intelligent than it is, and with that de-estheticizes it, that is, renders it useless as a means to the end of esthetic experience. Paradoxical as it may seem, reproduction, which claims to serve memory, leads us to forget what is most memorable — experientially real — about the art by reducing it to an appearance. The real work is superseded by its cannibalization in reproduction. Read More:http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/kuspit/art-and-capitalist-spectacle2-8-11.asp…

…We are all members of the society of the spectacle, which is correlate with capitalist society. Warhol, who presciently called himself a business artist, was also a celebrity artist, that is, a servant of the society of the spectacle — an artist who, like it, preferred appearance to reality — who celebrated appearance at the expense of reality, indeed, used it to obscure and deny reality. The society of the spectacle is a postmodern society, in that it has given up on external as well as internal reality, treating both as codified appearances. It has given up on what psychoanalysts call reality testing. Modern art grappled with both realities, dialectically teasing out their inherent esthetics — the esthetics of their own dialectical relationship — which became its own reality. Postmodern art subsumes modern art — and reality, internal and external — by reproducing it as a cultural code: one among many, and thus of no special consequence. Pos

ernism kitschifies modern art and its modern reading of reality, and reality as such. In postmodernity and postmodern art the shock of the new becomes the schlock of the neo, as a New York saying goes, and reality is de-realized and de-personalized, completing the much acknowledged process of alienation and dehumanization in modernity and modern art. ( ibid.)