This post appeared on 22 April. 10 comments appeared within the first week, and only 1 more in the subsequent 3.5 months. Blogspace is a collective and emergent manifestation of our culture’s obsession with novelty. So I suppose you could say that this entire blog is an ironic work of collective art.

There used to be a distinction between the work of art and its public display. For a lot of the transgressive collective art installations the spectacle is the art. The Situationists started the art-as-spectacle movement; Guy Debord in the Society of the Spectacle laid out the rationale in a dadaist-marxist context:

“In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation… Considered in its own terms, the spectacle is an affirmation of appearances and an identification of all human social life with appearances. But a critique that grasps the spectacle’s essential character reveals it to be a visible negation of life – a negation that has taken on a visible form.”

Here is Debord’s text: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Society_of_the_Spectacle

The medieval cathedrals were collective works of art-as-spectacle, but they were generated by the mainstream social order. Blockbuster films are collective art-spectacles generated in our mainstream culture. What’s disturbing is the self-ironization built into these spectacles. Pirates of the Caribbean is a movie purportedly about a transgressive subculture (pirates), but it’s inspiration derives from a ride at a theme park. The movie probably made more money in one day than all the pirates ever did throughout history. As Baudrillard observes, these simulacra are the reality of our times. Does transgressive ironic spectacle still mean anything when the mainstream culture has already coopted the concept? Perhaps the appropriate work of artistic disruption would have been for some group of outlaws to rob the movie theater’s ticket window during the opening of the Pirates film.

Debord prefaced his book with a quote from Feuerbach: “But for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, appearance to essence … truth is considered profane, and only illusion is sacred. Sacredness is in fact held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness.”

The church was the realm of spectacle; per Marx, capitalism coopted religion by fetishizing consumer goods, imbuing them with an intangible plenitude that generates consumer desire. Does the church now create spectacles of itself in an ironic reversal of the original sacred illusion?