Texts from The Media City
The Media City contains a wide variety of text-types: maps, newspapers sourced from different countries, random words and phrases cut from magazines and newspapers, sometimes reassembled into new 'collaged' texts, such as: "being and woman is like watching Paris Texas: kind of a random experience, but interesting."
The quarter devoted to the media and celebrity contains long quotations from various sources that have been glued together using individual printed letters. These quotations are as follows:
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from John Berger's Ways of Seeing. London: BBC and Penguin, 1972
Publicity is the life of this culture - in so far as without publicity capitalism could not survive - and at the same time publicity is its dream. (p154)
Publicity is about social relations, not objects. Its promise is not of pleasure, but of happiness: happiness as judged from the outside by others. The happiness of being envied is glamour. (p132)
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from Elizabeth Sussman's on the Passage of a few people through a rather brief moment in time: The Situationist International 1957-1972. Cambridge, Mass: MIT, 1991
The inability to recognize the sustaining role played by the sympathetic representation of poverty as a form of economic 'otherness' is but another example of the root of what Guy Debord called "the spectacle."
and quoted by Sussman from Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle 1967
The spectacle is the moment when the commodity has attained the 'total occupation' of social life. Not only is the relation to the commodity visible but it is all one sees: the world one sees is its world.
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from Lucy Lippard's Out of the Safety Zone from Art in America December 1990
...he deposited 100 pounds of bloody animal bones in the hallway of the Leo Castelli Gallery on West Broadway ... "it was a reaction to wealth being presented as culture. (p138)
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from a newspaper article on journalism, source and author unknown
The coverage is distorted by celebrity and the worship of celebrity; by the reduction of news to gossip, which is the lowest form of news; by sensationalism, which is always a turning away from a societies real condition; and by a political and social discourse that we - the press, the media, the politicians and the people - are turning into a sewer.