Comin' straight from the underground. The Cat Piano at chunnel.com. I like this site because it directly recognizes that the global artistic underground needs to be connected and provides a place to do it. Arty shorts, ads with actual artistic content for products with that aren't evil. It's only by taking back control of art from the big studios and ad agencies that we will liberate our culture from the corrosive authoritarian influences that currently dictate, or at least attempt to dictate, our output.
Which provides a convenient segue into The Society of the Spectacle. Written by Guy Debord back in 1968 and elucidated Situationism, the artistic heir of Surrealism, this particular text discusses the advent of the Spectacle. The Spectacle is the aesthetic means by which global capitalism effects it's cultural agenda. Being becomes having becomes appearing until that's all that even matters. Appearances. The content is drained from art and all that remains is it's meaningless shell. It's inevitable when the only goal is to turn it around for a profit. Take for example Pop Art and it's debased successors.
We are given art by mandate, and only given the option of which banality to prefer. But things have been changing little by little and the speed at which they change gets faster every day. The internet in it's early forms allowed us to communicate more rapidly and as speeds increase it we can share art more and more effectively. Films, photos, anything. We no longer must accept what's piped into our homes by News Corp. Anyone with the desire and the tools can create art and share it with anyone almost anywhere on Earth. The Spectacle won't be dismantled easily, it's tentacles extend everywhere and burrow subtly and deep. It will be a fight, but a fight we may well win.
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