comments on the society of the spectacle

(Mr Ai stores his materials between his vast studios and warehouses.) The artist persuaded the museum to strip out the internal walls from its ground-floor gallery space so he could lay out five “fields” of collected artefacts, among them Neolithic tools and the spouts of broken teapots. Mr Ai arranged 90 tonnes of steel reinforcing bars in one gallery: they had been retrieved from schools destroyed in the Sichuan earthquake of 2008, which had killed more than 5,000 children.Ī new show, “Making Sense”, which recently opened at the Design Museum in London, includes several large-scale works. A huge sculpture at the Royal Academy in 2015 was designed to evoke horror as well as awe. In 2010 he covered the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern with 100m handmade porcelain sunflower seeds-a reference both to Chinese Communist Party imagery, wherein Mao Zedong represented the sun, and a symbol of brighter times to come. In 1995 he produced three black-and-white photographs in which he smashed what looked like a 2,000-year-old urn it was not clear whether the ceramic was real or a fake. Pointing the finger clearly at those who benefit from the logicof domination, Debord’s Comments convey the revolutionary impulse atthe heart of situationism.A I WEIWEI IS a master of spectacle. Resolutely refusingto be reconciled to the system, Debord trenchantly slices through thedoxa and mystification offered tip by journalists and pundits to showhow aspects of reality as diverse as terrorism and the environment, theMafia and the media, were caught up in the logic of the spectacularsociety. In Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, publishedtwenty years later, Debord returned to the themes of his previousanalysis and demonstrated how they were all the more relevant in aperiod when the “integrated spectacle” was dominant. Credited by many as being the inspiration for the ideasgenerated by the events of May 1968 in France, Debord’s pitiless attackon commodity fetishism and its incrustation in the practices of everydaylife continues to burn brightly in today’s age of satellite televisionand the soundbite.

First published in 1967, Guy Debord’s stinging revolutionary critique ofcontemporary society, The Society of the Spectacle has since acquired acult status.

Comments on the society of the spectacle