Once upon a time in Athens, #6

Tzavella St., 04.05.2013 (paste-up by WD)

The last thought of resisting that reality

 Barbara Kruger, Untitled, 1985 [Visual Art Source] 

[T]he original affinity between business and entertainment reveals itself in the meaning of entertainment itself: as society's apologia. To be entertained means to be in agreement. Entertainment makes itself possible only by insulating itself from the totality of the social process, making itself stupid and perversely renouncing from the first the inescapable claim of any work, even the most trivial: in its restrictedness to reflect the whole. Amusement always means putting things out of mind, forgetting suffering, even when it is on display. At its root is powerlessness. It is indeed escape, but not, as it claims, escape from bad reality but from the last thought of resisting that reality. The liberation which amusement promises is from thinking as negation.  

Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception (Dialectic of Enlightenment, transl. Edmund Jephcott, Stanford University Press, 2002, pp. 115-116)  

Once upon a time in Athens, #5

Eresou St., 19.12.2014 (Paste-up: Scar One)

Under each other's influence

[Pinterest]

John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands 

A Woman Under the Influence | 1974

[The Criterion Collection]

Commodity fetishism: buy me, I'll change your life

Barbara Kruger, Untitled, 1984 [Skarstedt]

A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.

[...]

The mysterious character of the commodity-form consists therefore simply in the fact that the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men's own labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves […] It is nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy we must take flight into the misty realm of religion. There the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men's hands. I call this the fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour as soon as they are produced as commodities, and is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities.

Excerpt from K. Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1, transl. Ben Fowkes, London: Penguin, 1976, pp. 163-165 (also available on the Marxists Internet Archive)

Just in case anyone is wondering

[National Post]

This photograph was taken by Christinne Muschi during the 2012 Mayday protest in Montreal. 

Saul Leiter: winter in New York City

Untitled, 1952 [Pinterest]

Saul Leiter

Postmen, 1952 [Art Blart]