Visions [contination]
What Might Kill Us All
There are counter-images to the ones presented by the state. Non-corporate art has turned darker
and dirtier as corporate art bombards viewers with comfort images. The system is so complex though;
these protest images get cooped by the state of power, and marketed to the "rebel" sector of society.
We are so passive as a society, and brainwashed by consumerism, counter images don't really seem to
make a difference. If they do have an effect, it appears to be the opposite. Phillip Morris constantly
tells us in advertisement that smoking gives cancer, yet there seems to be more smokers everyday, as
if the anti-campaign worked as well or even better than a regular campaign. Maybe there really is no
such thing as bad publicity.
The false necessities might seem bad. But lets face it, this has
always existed. The problem with today's form of conspicuous consumption is the acceleration of the
process. What's valuable today, is old news tomorrow. Products' shelf-life end faster everyday.
Andy Warhol said, "in the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes." We could interpret this as
as the future world having a 15 minute attention spam. Our culture is having a seizure, there's too much information to handle, and people's
brains simply are too tired to care. An epileptic attack of such magnitude cannot last forever though,
there's always a breaking point. When will we break? When will the tower fall? It seems sooner than later.
Maybe the world will succumb almost exactly as it did in A Hundred Years of Solitude. As the character
reads through the prophetic book, events unwind before his eyes, and the last sentence read ends in his
dismissal. We as a nihilistic society raise the bar daily, every act of knowledge, every improvement of
technology is a grain of sand in the scales of life that determine the world's end. To be more profane:
technology is like having a rabbit poop into a scale, soon enough the shit spreads.
