The premise of this collection of articles is that the arts and artists have become as much the weapons as the targets of the spectacle. If this treatise continues to carry considerable critical weight, our concern here is to envisage its contemporary pertinence to the visual arts scene. Mass media lays out the territory, obviously using consumer goods: for Debord, the spectacle’s field of action is infinite. This perpetually reproduced division, which reminds us that the spectacle is “both the result and the project of the present mode of production,” 2delineates the alienation that is the central issue of his theory. “The spectacle is capital to such a degree of accumulation that it becomes an image ” 1 this consumer society-created illusion deploys a separation of reality and representation. Let us recall that Debord made a critique, informed by Marxist thought, of the ways in which daily life and social relationships were dominated by the commodity. The spectacle that Guy Debord denounced in his book The Society of the Spectacle (1967) has pursued its insidious development over the last forty-five years. Gilles Lipovetsky and Jean Serroy, L’esthétisation du monde (2013). It has often been said that the “society of the spectacle” is outmoded in a world dominated by interactive networks and the virtual, by reference points for authenticity and transparency.
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