CONTENTS - ouroboros ponderosa

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MEDIA, IRONY AND "BOB"
It is not my purpose here to lament the fact that culture has been
liquidating itself for some time now. Artists no longer want to tell us
anything-they have nothing left to say. With postmodernism the idea of
slyle itself enters a stage of bankruptcy; its incoherent banality turns
postmodernism into the fast-food chain of expression and reflects the
,"posed condition of representation in general.
In its enervated, late capitalist decline, art is increasingly no more than
a specialized colony of the media. The vapid acquiescence of, say, a
Warhol has made it easier for corporations like Mobil and Xerox to
understand that all art, at base, serves authority. Thus their sponsorship
of culture for the masscs exists not only to improve their negative public
images but also to promote the artistic for its own qualities. Philip
Morris, to cite a most instrumental use of art, employs oversized graphics
at the world's largest cigarette factory to create a culturally valorized
workplace, in order to motivate and pacilY workers. Media-style art uses
symbolS to drown out the employees' alienation and argue the existence
of a shared cultural unity between owners, managers, and workers. This
intention brings to mind perhaps the deepest function that Muzak
attempts; one of its foremost psychologists and advisors, James Keenan,
explained that "Muzak promotes the sharing of meaning because it
massifies symbolism in which not a few but all can participate." Reaching
80 million people a day, Muzak is one of the grosser tactics in power's
struggle against the global devaluation of symbols.
The Surrealists, among other avant-gardes, set themselves the goal of
aestheticizing life. Today this goal is being realized at a time when avant­
gardism is nearing extinction; the ubiquity of art as manipulation is
achieving this aestheticization, and is no more than advertising and styles
of consumerism. The fact that the world's best photography is expressed
as TV commercials is a perfect illustration of the technologized,
commodified culture striving to reach everyone.
This would-be conquest by media easily puts all the goods of culture
in its service, as it must when there are so many signs that the whole
spectacle of simulated life is running out of gas.
H the spiritless melange in painting known as postmodcrnism implies,