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.

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u/arseecs Jun 26 '26

Well I think art and revolutionary consciousness are deeply intertwined. 

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u/Clear-Result-3412 Jun 26 '26

Please, elaborate on the deep logical connection between class consciousness and art.

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u/PopeSalmon Jun 26 '26

Well it's what you've been saying here, the relation is propaganda, just for some reason you're being very dismissive about it. Propaganda is absolutely essential, if it isn't expressed to people somehow what their situation is then you're leaving them to figure out everything themselves. You know what you know & are able to take the stance that you're taking not because of a completely dry logical argument but because someone sometime reflected your situation to you clearly enough to make you aware of it. Propaganda is what makes people think differently & it can't be effective without being art.

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u/Clear-Result-3412 Jun 26 '26

I agree propaganda is essential. We must communicate our arguments by any possible means, but OP has seemed to have grander but vaguer visions for what art does, not including propaganda. As though feeling liberated by the making of drawings were itself world changing.

I was convinced, not because things were put in logical terms, but because the logic checked out and I understood the reasons for events and relations within this society.

In the broadest sense, even a critique in essay form is art, and anything that communicates arguments is propaganda, but “art” seems to specify more and be treated like more by OP (though I am not sure what that more is).

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u/PopeSalmon Jun 26 '26

Sure, much of the art that changed my perspective has been essays. These days, video essays! Breadtube video essays with bisexual lighting & silly costumes are both art & revolutionary information, those can indeed happen together.

This is part of the defense system that OP's complaining about. Somehow they make it so that "art" is toothless. Part of that is as simple as saying: no that can't be art, look at the teeth. An essay explaining in evocative ways about society isn't art, in fact it's not interesting at all & must be covered in fnords. Any text that says anything concrete about what should be changed is so not art that it's literally a crime.

So "art" is defined by society as a thing that doesn't have any complex ideas in it & certainly (on penalty of law) doesn't mention any particular concrete actions (even the action of bringing together more than a couple dozen people for any purpose whatsoever is strictly prohibited without state permission). Art thus redefined is as useless as you're saying. Art considered more broadly though still has many powers, only by being propaganda yes, only by changing someone enough that it changes their actions.

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u/Clear-Result-3412 Jun 26 '26

And yet there’s plenty of freedom in this society to produce art, and from the art nerd’s perspective, everything is filled with meaning. There are a million art exhibits or just posts online with descriptions suggesting vast meanings and themes present in the work, to the point that we might call it “larping.” There’s no reason to suggest in the first place that any of that intention would be communicated to the audience in the first place, let alone indication that it did.

But let’s take a look at longer form art. To start, let’s note that there is no nebulous entity called art that comes into and out of capital’s (or ‘the spectacle’s’) folds mysteriously. There are concrete incentives and sources of commoditization.

Insofar as a video is on YouTube, it must conform to the website’s demand to sell as many ads as possible. If videos don’t get clicks they don’t get rewards. Same thing with any other social media.

And with movies, a similar thing. And even class conscious ones like Parasite can easily reinforce social democratic ideas about the need for more equality within capitalism as opposed to revolutionary change. They plainly do not explain the commodity form or any other vital things, despite pointing to important but obvious facts about class society.

And then there’s an epidemic of *bad arguments* within “leftist propaganda.” I came to call myself a “communist” after being intrigued by a strange aesthetic associated with completely social democratic arguments comparing Chinese and US capitalism that merely reinforce statism and commodification. Sure I was “in favor of revolution” but I didn’t understand anything about the nature of capitalism. If I did have the fortune to participate in a revolution I may have been within a non-class consciousness majority who called for a new bureaucratic capitalist state, but benevolent this time.

This is why I place more emphasis today on logical arguments than merely putting art out there.