As mass culture became steadily more spectacular and immersive - with larger high-definition TV sets and vast cinema screens, with the enclosed and carefully calculated spectacle of the shopping centre or theme park - art had to compete. It could do so, as we have seen, by feeding off the allure of mass culture while adding its own aesthetic and estranged edge. It could compete by reversing the norms of mass culture: to take video as an example, it could produce slow, portentous pieces without camera movement, narrative, or obvious meaning, to set against the standard moral tales and visual incident of TV. It could provide impressive, nonfunctional objects and environments that, unlike those of the mall or resort, were not geared to selling (or at least not to the vast majority of their viewers).
- Julian Stallabrass
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