Theft at the Public Till
is failure to make patterns. However, the world as it is seen on the retina is not schematic, it is pattern. But this is the same thinking that sees hand, not the line and shadow of a hand-, it can be useful, but not when you want to make a decision. Decisions by labels eliminate all vestiges of the individuals affected by them. The famous are well aware of this. For example, when Walter Gropius came to America to take over the design program at Harvard, he found, somewhat to his surprise, that he had also come to take over the direction of architecture in the United States. "Every so often I feel a strong urge to shake off this growing crust so that the man behind the tag and the label may become visible again." Decisions based on labels tend not to work for everyone just for most. And if you are in the "others," well... It is not so much in the operation of institutions as in the freeing of technologies and images that the glorious form of American reality is to be found: in the immoral dynamic of images, in the orgy of goods and ser- vices, an orgy of power and useless energy (yet who can say where useful energy ends?), in which the spirit of advertising is more to the fore than Tocqueville's public spirit. Everything is in the credits. Now that society has been definitively turned into an enterprise, everything is in the synopsis of performance and enterprise, and its leaders must produce all the signs of the advertising look. Consumption and its pursuit seem to now define our lives. Look at the changes in the world of the arts. I will leave aside such late twentieth century literary feats such as Bret Easton Ellis, and turn instead to the world of fine art. Good art has always been valued and, as a com- modity, it had been sought after at least since the seventeenth century. But the insistence that it be not merely good but authentic, that it be not merely attributable but documented, took hold only in the middle of the eighteenth century and became widespread at the end of the nineteenth. With reproductions so readily available, the death knell of the individual object and of originality itself rings like catechism through the turgid pages of contemporary criticism. We have now lived with mechanical reproduc- tion, or photography, for over 150 years. But the result of photography's success is not that the art object has lost its value, but that its value has
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