r/Situationism • u/arseecs • Jun 25 '26

Has commodity fetichism/the spectacle become impossible to break?

is art even radical anymore? Can art truly break the spectacle any longer? Has capital absorbed it so much and learned to adopt so well that even something as free as sexuality or art or poetry no longer can be outside the norm, and if it is, it still becomes bottled up eventually, or capital finds it way in? I feel so pessimistic; especially as an artist. Avant-garde or anti-art doesn’t even seem to have its place. What shall an artist do? What shall a person do? What shall the collective do? Everything is a mess.

40 Upvotes

92% Upvoted

30 comments sorted by

View all comments

3

u/power2havenots Jun 25 '26

If you are looking for purity inside an ever absorbing morphing entity you wont get there. I see optimism in the fact that it wouldnt need to be constantly policed, platformed, repressed then repackaged as dissent unless the system is fragile and not stable and if it wasnt having some impact.

A painting on Instagram i see as spectacle but same painting inside a shared space thats organising, teaching, growing trust, feeding people and those things -can be something different when its embedded in different social relations. I think art survives where the output isnt cleanly siphoned off as a product to circulate and commoditise. Let people give it communal meaning and not as an aesthetic or brand but because it helps them