A century of style

Red is the new pink.

A hundred years ago some men in a room smoked cigars and decided the fate of Syria. The Great Powers would civilize these barbarians yet and unleash a century of great style and panache. The classical pose. 

A fleeting image to tug at our sensibilities..then turn the page.

'Many [images] fall flat, the gestures and poses too affected; their tropes grown weary through overuse (ungainly, vamped-up, languid, exotic, arty, theatrical, 'real'): saturated novelty lacking character. There are only really three expressions now: neutral (seductive), seductive (seductive) and faux-animated. The over contrivance means a lack of drama, and loosed from their serial place in the magazine, they seem like finales without their preceding movements, revealing nothing, going nowhere.'

--Alice Spawls.

~

'Like Mill, we may be passionate about individual freedom of expression, and so about the freedom of the press to represent individuals' opinions and views. But freedom of expression is for individuals, not for institutions. We have good reasons for allowing individuals to express opinions even if they are invented, false, silly, irrelevant or plain crazy, but hardly for allowing powerful institutions to do so. Yet we are now perilously close to a world in which media conglomerates act as if they too had unrestricted rights of free expression, and therefore a licence to subject positions for which they don't care to caricature and derision, misrepresentation or silence. If they had those unconditional rights they would have rights to undermine individuals' abilities to judge for themselves and to place their trust well, indeed rights to undermine democracy.'

Onora O'Neill

~

In the attention economy the media must be able to hold our attention-for a second- and then release us back into the system of getting and spending. Nothing could be worse than being fixated on an image. Instead, we must be 'fixated' on the flow of images, news stories, gossip and trivia. Breaking news, the news that doesn't stay news, is what it's all about. Anything that generates comments, publicity..that has "impact", "visibility" (even academics are now encouraged to sell themselves in this way). Anything is as good or bad as anything else ("pushpin is as good as poetry"..there are no judgements when it comes to taste). 'Good' and 'Bad' is, so, 19th century! 

The show must go on, said the American salesman. 

And all the while let us not think of the incredible concentrations of power and wealth in the financial sector and the mass media. 

Is it me, or are Beyonce and Kim Kardashian everywhere? Is blogging just another (successful) attempt at fragmenting consciousness?