Let’s entertain


The crucial issue of how the world of the spectacle has so completely pervaded our society was dealt with extraordinary clarity and foresight by the Situationist philosopher Guy Debord in his renowned 1967 work, The Society of the Spectacle. In it he states, among other things, that in the West experience has been reduced to an immense accumulation of performances; what was once directly perceived has been transformed into image, and images have become our reality. This transformation could not help but have a determining influence on artistic practice. To avoid the risk of gradual cultural marginalization—even if within an ivory tower—contemporary art has been forced, so to speak, to align itself more and more closely with the pervasive paradigm of the spectacle, which is everywhere diffused by the means and insinuated by the content of mass media. This alignment has affected the development of artistic techniques, installation strategies, and aesthetic attitudes.
The person who understood all this in the ’60s, better than any other figure in Pop art, was Andy Warhol. In addition to his use of silk screen and photography, Warhol exploited many other aspects of the world of mass communication...


The full text is published in "tema celeste" No. 84, March-April 2001.




Fancesco Poli