Vampirism+decadence+greed
I was pondering my fate, as I tend to do in dentists’ waiting rooms, when I hit on the idea of distracting myself with all the beautiful people in one of those high fashion magazines that smell of bad perfume. I thought the vacuity might be restful. The experience was worse than burnt coffee.
It had been some time since I leafed through one of those archives of obscene consumerism. I was struck by the ill-making blend of vampirism, decadence and pure coldbloodedness.
The darling men looked boneless and feckless. The beautiful women looked bloodless and robotic. I had the sense that by comparison the decadent court of Louis Seize must have looked rosy and jolly.
The vampirism in these slick shoots was overpowering. The camera wasn’t fondling the subject, it was extracting its blood. The men seemed helpless, detracting from their beauty. The women seemed wi-fi’d to some malodorous off-scene puppet master.
This concoction of vampirism, decadence and greed struck me as apocalyptic. How could a world so drained of spontaneity, generosity and moral value continue?
Well, as it turned out, I wasn’t facing a root-canal job or anything more dire than having stumbled into this vampire’s harem of a magazine, but the experience reminded me that we do indeed become used to hanging if we hang long enough, and our society seems to have become used to decadence, which, we should remember, is deathward, no matter how rouged the cheek or coiffed the hair or chic the couture.—DM
I like this analogy and, if I may add to it, the skin colour in these couture photographs correspond to the bloodlessness, a wan pallor enhances the post modern coldness.
My thoughts: the high fashion world of the photographer is just that, a ‘world’. Within that world of fashion, glam photography and couture is the need to look innovative, so they ever strive for the ‘new’ or the ’shocking’. How ‘clever’ this all is! And this must continue within their ‘world’ or they fail due to the criticism of them in seats of that world’s power.
This sort of art one cannot help admiring for its confronting eye-appeal but when, as you say, it becomes the ‘norm’ then society accepts this imagery without question, and, even demands it even though it is far removed from any reality. It is a fantasy world that seeks to impress and overwhelm with its own self-importance.
Eagle, one of the things I love about walking around the streets of Manhattan is its companionable multi-ethnicity. The races of man are showing the world in Manhattan something it is not always willing to see: we can live harmoniously with each other. But the advertising world, which supports the publishing industry, pays the merest lip service to this idea. The models are predominantly of North European extraction, with a few “ethnics” featured as sops. The culture is North European, and the rest of the world is presented as exotic in the same way the Orientalists described by the late Edward Said portrayed the Islamic world as exotic. This cultural triumphalism doesn’t go unnoticed in the world. I attribute its persistence to hubris.
The same kind of elitism shows up in the literary establishment where it is often said poetry has but a tiny audience. This view is predicated on a deafness to rap, rai and all the other forms of poetry that we don’t recognize as poetry, such as tabloid headlines, the great religious works of the world, and the classics that have shaped our culture, such as Gilgamesh, The Odyssey and The Iliad. It takes a great deal of elitism to insist on the view that poetry is unpopular. If that is your view, what poetry are you talking about?—DM
Mine is something that I doubt that the powers that judge the world wouldn’t spend a second look at, with so much of what is available is from ‘formula’, designed for the increase of wealth.
I see contemporary art as a ’shunting’, a means to an economic end. If it makes the money, promote it and mass produce it. This gets proven in far less successful than the original movie sequels. It’s all a bit of joke as the end result seems to be the cheapening of the original!
I paint pictures, some fine equine art, and the galleries where I live wouldn’t give my pictures the time of day. Not impressive enough, sorry! But I’ll do what I want regardless.
Poetry needs meditation and it seems that what becomes popular is dictated by consumers. Like slurping down a can of coke, much of what is promoted in pop culture is quick to gratify, easily digested and bringing in revenue. I ‘am’ v/cynical!—Acoustic Eagle