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On a more mundane level, consumer capitalism badly needs the artistic imagination: someone has to create Mickey Mouse or Treasure Island, Fagin or Hannibal Lecter and all the other fictions represented in simulation. So it seems that art will continue, whether the artist is subsumed by the spectacl…

[...] To old, dirty Europe, America has always seemed aglow with toothpaste, Gleem and deodorizers for every intimate inch. Showers seem to gush constantly. And Hollywood -- every image has been dry-cleaned. We know that America is pathologically, obsessively, fanatically obsessed with hygiene. Thi…

[...] somewhere within that brush of angel's wings there is, even more faintly, the tiny shadow of an idea, inarticulated, that maybe not absolutely all of the serious ugliness and sickness lay in the opponents, the straight, corrupt world, but that some of it, at a much deeper level than the one t…

[...] Ellis's apparent vapidity and abnegation of moral issues tends to conceal a harsh, stony-faced puritanism whereas Wojnarowicz's moral stance emerges from a much gentler and more optimistic view, which nevertheless speaks of a wearing away of the spirit in close, daily observation of the unbea…