CONSCIOUSNESS SPECTACULARIZATION AND THE RURAL – SPECTACULAR CULTURAL PATTERN IN MASS MEDIA

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The paper depicts the process of consciousness spectacularization and the adoption of rural – spectacular cultural pattern via mass communication media in Serbia in the 2000–2005 period. Culturally, consciousness spectacularization via mass communication media, is in line with the process of cultural globalization and, when it comes to TV, is mostly reflected in non-critical overtaking of mass culture contents dominated by the products of global entertainment industry. In the tracks of Debord’s critical and theoretical principles, the paper theoretically considers the idea of media spectacle.

THE FACE OF SPECTACLE

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This theoretical study takes its starting point in the blemished photography The Face by Damjan Kocjan, Slovene author (b.1970), contrasting it with the Duchamp’s Replacing Portrait. Through its interdisciplinary approach, the study has tried to illuminate the continuity which the artist’s idea achieves through the fluidity in time, as well as the different impacts caused both by the recipients’ identity and the cultural patterns it itself was grounded upon.

The disguising strategy, as the two authors’ crossing point, deals with the issues of the original art work, i.e. photography, the gender variability, and finally, with the role of the disguised subject in the public space. The whiteness caused by the destructive, iconclassic features on Koncjančić’s portrait, has anticipated the co-authoring issues, the matters of space in the context of heteropathy and the modern society tendency to postpone its own temporality both by technical intervention of the face and the spectacularly acts. With its possibility to reproduce individuals, people and the history, the photography, through its phantasmagoric disguise and the identity of others, opens up a space for a non-responsible game. In that process, the public face of the spectacle as an advertising means, converts its own merit into the economic, cultural and social equity, fashioning the people for prestigious society classes, granting them the power of superior and dominant faces.

The technical view of the new world order, as Virilio puts it, is only but a media glimpse shaping our identities, making ourselves the photographies of our own destiny in which we are objectified by technology and its destructivness as the final point of conformity existence, when in the name of culture, the predominance over origin, in a brutal and merciless way, is taken over by the technology.

SPECTACLE IN THE CLASSROOM

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The paper examines the relationship of the spectacle and information technology in a specific field of culture – in the field of education. Which shows that the spectacle is in new technological conditions in culture, also institutionally accepted as a motivational factor in the development of the individual.

THE CULTURE OF MODERN SPECTACLE

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Media culture of today is defined by the logic of victorious spectacle expanding to all areas of life. Post-modern capitalism has turned everyday life and culture into entertainment with the help of spectacle. In fact, such entertainment is a fake sense of happiness, pop mainstream, swallowing up alternatives and therefore a passive consumption society. The media today have a unique power of bringing information and overwhelm a person with various data. They enable a modern person to know much, but understand little. The discussion has cast some light on presently very popular reality shows, body and sports. It concludes with the reflection on modern media, which leave a person of this age with a patchwork identity.

MEDIA COMMERCIALISM, SPECTACULAR PERFORMANCES AND MODERN INDIVIDUAL

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The contemporary civilization almost completely oversees the fact that the monopoly in creation of spiritual space now belongs to communication media, which establish what in the world is important (or rather, true). Spectacle and simulation, medialized war, entertainment and images of typized values deprives individual of the possibility to decide her/himself what is really important. That way a new man (man of the present) was formed, the man who consents to displacement of his mind, i.e. agrees that someone else think instead himself. This postmodern man rejects to critically position himself in the face of presented mass media contents, thus being transformed into the object of civilization. A spiritual rennaisance is needed if we are to build a more productive community and a more guenuine individual; but it also necessiates a change of economic order which should be submitted to human needs, while on the other hand, society itself should develop and promote the principles of truthfulness and honesty.

FROM CLASSIC ACADEMIC MUSEUM TO MUSEUM IN THE LIGHT OF SPECTACLE

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This short paper attempts to highlight the process of restructuring the canons of classic, academic museology, preoccupied with exhibitional (presentational) functions of the museum, into an uptodated standards relying on its interpretative and communication role, thus making museum more of a spectacle the means and forms of which enable the museum “to revive” its artefacts. This “revival” includes various cultural, artistic and educational intiatives and actions in the form of animation projects, inscenation and staging of performing art events in traditional museum and gallery spaces now turned to centers of cultural events and a kind of communication media. This entails understanding of a new concept of representative and performing arts, their presence in a context different from the traditional one, interaction with museum collections, reception of these arts, but also their mediation role in man-artefact relationship.

EDITOR’S NOTE

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MARKETING REVIEW OF ARTS AUDIENCE

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The audience is the main reason for creating spectacles and art events. The audience is its integral part. One of the biggest problems for marketers is that there is not such a big interest in cultural products and events. Besides, the fact is that one cultural need can always be replaced by another. In theory, if you manage properly, you will have a regular visitor instead of a part time customer. Unfortunately, it is much easier said than done.

CULTURE AS PHANTASM

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In this paper I address the relation between the concepts of ”spectacle” (the spectacular) and ”simulacrum” (simulations), in the context of contemporary art and culture. Contemporary (western) culture appears, in its dominant part at least, as a culture of spectacles and simulations. These two concepts appear almost as synonyms, referring to the same cultural phenomenon. To understand their meaning and significance for contemporary culture, these concepts are also explained in the context of their genesis. Special attention is paid to a series of paradoxes that rise in the analysis of the concepts as contemporary theoretical models.

RITUAL TIME OF THE BELGRADE BOOK FAIR

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The author analyzes the Book Fair as a peculiar modern festival with specific ritual elements. Out of complexity of its temporal discourse this cultural event derives its specific structure which provides for its symbolic-ritual potential.

Modern festivals inherited their ritual-symbolic forms from the former, mostly religious ones. Ritual elements of contemporary happenings are breaking a chronotop of everyday linearity. Modern festival also brings about a new understanding of social cohesion. While potentials of renewal and affirmation of a community as a whole were inherent to the old model of ritual and festival, the contemporary festival out of the field of social dispersion establishes cohesion of a micro group.

In the contemporary cultural-political discourse the need for ritual persists as an archetypal necessity, as a mean enabling community to reaffirm and renew itself. The fact that modern festival lacks capacity of totality facilitating a social community to identify with it as a whole, significantly relativizes this archetypal normative.

The relativization of contemporary festivals, their invisibility on the universal level has to find its counter-balance somewhere else if they are to remain a genuine social need. The point of balance between the former totality of festival and ephemeral character of the contemporary one has been found in specialization of the latter. The Book Fair is a kind of normative communitas organized within a social system, and demanding a certain degree of social control.