"To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and true success is to labour" Robert Louis Stevenson

Considering how much we consume its fairly rare to find anyone who contentedly affirms that they are full. Satisfaction or gratification appears an elusive state, despite the ever-expanding range of consumer choice. For critics of our saturated culture of thrills, spills and entertaining spectacles, such restlessness or dissatisfaction is symptomatic of the paucity of pleasures on offer. The flashing, blinking lights of popular culture serve only as momentarily, ineffectual distractions. Finding pleasure in these hollow offerings reveals a pathology of character; an inability to confront the irresputable condition of human fate.
More sympathetic chroniclers of the human psyche, less prone to criticize the urge to find solace and pleasure in the seemingly trivial, inconsequential twists and turns of TV, film and music, would see such pleasure as our only source of solace, a rare opportunity to get lost in music, to forget who you are, to blank out the inevitable brevity and fragility of human existence. We are, after all, just worm meat on the shelf, so who can blame for getting our kicks when and where can. Consequently the pursuit of distracting pleasures is more important than their ability to satisfy. As Zygmount Bauman in his book Society under siege, writes "people tend to sincerely believe that what they truly desire is tranquility but they delude themselves: what they are truly after is agitation. What they truly crave is to chase the hare, not to catch it. The pleasure is in the hunting not in the prey".

Once upon a time, consuming was a fixed option; humans had a fixed number of needs that had to be satisfied in order for them to survive. Survival was the name of the game, the pursuit of consumption. Once these needs had been met there was no necessity to continue to consume. Indeed prior to our current orgy of consumption, over excessive or ostentatious consumption was regarded as a mortal sin – "off with their heads".
Today however, consumption has been liberated from instrumental necessity and survival (admittedly western phenomena). Just to consume is now enough in and of itself. The pleasures of consuming, however spurious they may be, is in and of itself, sufficient motivation. Whereas once the gratification of needs was the engine that drove the motor of consumption, today the dynamic is less about satisfaction of appetite, but the necessity to maintain the state of restless desire – to keep chasing the hare. As Bauman says "consumer society proclaims the impossibility of gratification and measures its progress by ever rising demand." It is the pleasure in maintaining this state of restless desire, a constant state of insatiability, which has become all-important.

The manner in which has risen to the challenge of reflecting and mirroring the omnipotence of the pleasures of consuming and the desire to keep consuming has been fairly tepid. Art sacralization in the last century often led to it running, screaming in hysterical terror from the apparently ravenous pleasures of popular mediums such as film, TV. With ascetic renunciation the order of the day, artist have often appeared to stick their head in the sand or somewhere worse. Of course not all artists are so terrified of the seemingly unstoppable, unruly pleasures of popular aesthetics. In recent years Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons and Cindy Sherman all betrayed their passion and love for the denigrated, ‘debased’ pleasures of the popular. What’s more they were unapologetic, shameless and guiltless about publicly admitting that they were prone to the ‘irrational’ desires of fans and culture junkies.
Not surprisingly, these admissions often cast them as heretics within arts pious church. Consistently their work was criticized for being fatally compromised by this passion; the all-important position of critical distance for the artist had been collapsed. Fun, enjoyment, entertainment are apparently incompatible with ‘serious’ art and serious ‘critical’ thinking. The modern sacralization of art, which places such a premium on a higher truth, finds it difficult to accommodate pleasure, passion and desire with such lofty aims (of course its not always been the case, ours is a peculiarly modern bout of puritan terror). For those consumed by a nightmarish vision of cultural apocalypse, the fan represents the ultimate ghoul. After all, for cultural conservatives and snobs, who better exemplifies the apparently terrifying power of popular pleasures to consume and enfeeble the individual, to blow them off the road to wisdom and enlightenment, than the fan?

"The rationality of consumer society is built out of the irrationality of its individualized actors" Bauman

Only a fool would deny that popular culture is full of rubbish, that it is capable of dehumanizing its audience (just as art does), but to stick the proverbial head in the sand (or is it somewhere else?) in an act of puritan aloofness, increasingly looks like an impotent move. In fact I can’t help thinking any artistic response to the power, dominance and popularity of popular / mass/ culture, call it what you will, propelled by fear is ultimately going to be revealed as impotent. Artists retreating into the securities of autonomous, esoteric objects in the face of "Big Brother" "I’m a celebrity get me out of here" and my personal favorite " Celebrity Detox Clinic" increasingly looks both nostalgic and reactionary. I want someone to illuminate some of the possible reasons why I experience an almost daily urge to publicly pronounce Mr. T’s favourite catchphrase – "What you lookin at FOOL?" or why my work colleague won’t shut up about Gary Coleman - "wot you talking about Willis?". Obviously for some, the enduring appeal of Gary Coleman or Mr. T may be trivial. But to paraphrase Bill Shankly , it’s not a question of life and death to me, it’s more important than that.

John Beagles 2003