My professional background is in design & development, community & economic development, urban governance & public policy. I also practice in the fields of seamanship, horsemanship, poetry, theology, & symbolism.
When life is so entangled with the internet, why shouldn’t images reflect the sensation of being online – its fury, its melancholy, its psychedelia? Why shouldn’t artists respond by going deeper, making not just new images, but new fables, protocols, values?
McLuhan was the prophet of cool, and as much as he personally despised contemporary media culture, he knew that the only way to critique it was to ride the wave; hence, The Medium is the Massage , a beautifully designed book of aphorisms condensing the ideas he worked out in detail in Understanding Media .
Marx’s core mistake is not that money influences culture — it always has — but that he mistakes the visibility of mass taste for the dominance of mass taste.
Before social media:
• Most people liked basic, commercial things too.
• You just didn’t see them.
• Culture was filtered through critics, editors, curators, and tastemakers.