Shit was wild how it was all George Bu$h and McDonald’s in Iraq with Ronald McDonald shitting on a kid and everyone was like yeah “ugh” or “I mean yeah, but cringe”
I find it hard to articulate what I found so bad about that art, but even from a young baby leftist perspective I found it really eye roll inducing.
Idk, maybe it’s “style over substance”, lots of obsession with the tacky aesthetics of corporate marketing with no real analysis of its nefariousness.
Honestly all art in the 2000s was just not very good.
What was up with the early 00s? That whole period is like a black hole in my memory. Granted I was a super introverted kid with a very boring childhood but I feel like a lot of us millennials consider it a cultural void, I’ve yet to really see much if any nostalgia for it despite it being about the right time.
9/11 brainworms combined with “end of history” brainworms. The fading away of the 90’s into nothingness, replaced by nothing but Bush-era terrorism panic.
The 2000s sucked in general. Pretty much everything kind of seemed like an afterthought.
Anyone remember Drawn Together? No
this is a lie, nobody said cringe like that in the mid 2000s
In the late 2000s there was sort of a proto-meme factoid going around the internet that German has a word, Fremdschämen, that refers to second-hand embarrassment and commenters would say how useful that word was and would speculate what the English equivalent would be. The term cringe appeared a few years later.
Anyone else remember Adbusters making an ugly shoe? Lol
I miss adbusters. As someone who really, really, really hates marketing i’ve always had sympathy of them
At the risk of stirring up sectarianism, adbusters (which itself as a movement is a direct descendant of situationism) illustrated the limits of that sorta New Left retreat from conflict in the political and economic spheres into the cultural sphere. This also applies to adjacent movements like the Billboard Liberation Front etc.
That’s not to say that there is no value in taking the fight to the cultural sphere but ultimately if your entire program is just the expansion of countersignalling against the behemoth that is the PR industry then you’re not going to achieve much because under capitalism, the house always wins (so long as you don’t flip the table.) Unfortunately they are all dead-end movements as far as I see it.
I lost all faith when they did a “takedown” of Baudrillard which was such a blatant misreading it was gross
Oh that’s interesting. I never came across that.
Tbh there’s a degree of culpability that philosophers like Baudrillard need to take in this situation because of what Foucault called their “terroristic obscurantism” (to which Foucault himself is certainly not free from guilt of committing); I think that Baudrillard is borderline a philosophical cypher that people can project meaning onto, especially if they aren’t doing a close reading and if they aren’t steeped in the tradition and the conversation that Baudrillard is a part of.
I might have to read what they had to say just out of idle curiosity.
omg!!! I totally forgot about the blackspot, what a trip ty! if anyone wants more info https://subscribe.adbusters.org/products/blackspot
