Sunday 6 November 2011

Protect me from what I want


The postmodernism exhibition currently running at the V&A is mildly interesting. The artwork which has stayed with me is one of Jenny Holzer's Truisms. In 1982, Holzer took an ad (the Public Art Fund paid) on a Times Square LED billboard. It read simply: "protect me from what I want." It was a cutting comment on modern consumerism in the age of "society of the spectacle" ((c) Guy Debord). It's now emblazoned on message t-shirts sold in the V&A shop.
This H&M stampede in Toulouse, France, shows that the protective layer guarding us from advertising, branding and the like has been peeled off whole. We're in the palms of the corporations. And we love it:

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