The Situationist concept of the Spectacle as developed mostly by Debord explicitly highlights the unreal and how we reify ourselves to accept the system we are subconsciously part of that constitutes the spectacle. We are subconsciously guided through the system via signs which are enhanced by the employment of emerging technologies such as media. It is media and advertising that are ultimately concealing the truth and allowing us to live in this phantasmagorical 'reality'. This in turn leads us to question what we see when we look at art, is it the artist's signature/name as a sign of both the art market and artist's status or is it the art we look at first. Depending on the layout of the art it can be argued that the genre of the art is a signature, a sign in itself. With reference to Baudrillard the sign is consistent with our language as a kind of formal understanding between us and the object. Entitling such movements or groups such as Situationism or Fluxus their signatures alone, can stand in for most art works they represent, as we are labelling art. What is interesting to note is a quote that I have taken from the book Art Since 1900: Modernism, Anti-modernism and Postmodernism by Hal Foster and Rosalind Krauss.
'One could argue that Fluxus was the first cultural project in the post-war period to recognise that collective constructions of identity and social relations were now primarily and universally mediated through reified objects of consumption, and that this systematic annihilation of conventional forms of subjectivity necessitated an equally reified and internationally disseminated aesthetic articulation.'
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