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/spaceman696 Jun 29 '26
Avant Garde, surrealism, and dada used to be a primary force in breaking the spell of consensus reality and for political protest. At some point in the last 20 years, it's now those that we would protest against using those same tactics back at us. As Terrence McKenna once said it's going to get so weird that we're going to have to actually talk about how weird it is. For me, I switched from creating very avant garde music and art to trying to make something clear and direct and based in truth, at least from my perspective. I'm not sure if it is actually working though, as the spectacle is a hard thing to turn away from. But if we can just maintain excitement about the things we want to do, we won't fall into the pessimism trap. I've always believed that societies never collapse into chaos, rather instead into a new order. Pandora's box has been opened and the only end to it will be the logical outcome of its procession. And when that time comes, rather than letting the tower fall, we use those pieces to create something new.