Advertise This!
Modernism is truly dead.
All that remains are a few doddering old men worrying about their prostates and voting for Democrats because no viable Socialist candidates exist.
The Modernists have all been replaced with advertising. I’d call this postmodern because “po-mo” is too easy, but it’s also really just 3rd or 4th generation Modernism—the Modernism that eats itself, which Modernism was absolutely fated to do.
What’s important is that advertising has now supplanted literature and art, and even news and entertainment. Advertising has long since replaced religion: the fast-growing charismatic sects specialize in conversion; they are spiritual null-sets existing only to create more proselytes.
The Modernist may have been an atheist, but he, like his hero Sartre, at least had sense enough to be disturbed and perhaps even inspired by it: the cosmic misgivings exuded in a single shit were more profound to Joyce than all the advertising jingles ever recorded.
My students (po-mo?) seem to think everything is boring. What they really mean is that they don’t like, can’t “relate” to, anything that does not advertise to them. Ads tell them how to be and how they are; anything that asks them to figure that out for themselves is just too hard.