Ok, today is the last day to enjoy from Skills of Economy Event. Come to see The Gospel of the Enlightened Consumer video essay by Teemu Takatalo until 4pm. In September 2011 Teemu Takatalo’s consumer critical mural The Absolution of the Enlightened Consumer was censored and destroyed in a gallery, in Tampere, Finland by the producers of the exhibition. The painting consisted of painted company logos of nine business enterprises, having their shops in the same shopping mall as the gallery, and texts about negligence of their social and environmental responsibility programs. The brutal act against a surely critical but harmless painting evoke lame public discussion about artists’ freedom of expression, but first of all it brought up some crucial questions: why, on the whole, is business life trying to convince us about its virtue? If and when the destructive character of the capitalist economy is a generally accepted fact, why does someone who admits this still kneel and stoop in front of the altars of capitalism? By analyzing this, Takatalo figured out a wider conceptual error that exists in consumption and capitalist production: both are structured in a way that remarkably resembles Christian theology, even though capitalism and Western culture are nowadays primarily understood as secular. As a capitalist market is a platform for most of human interactions; the Christian ´concept of goodness has transformed in immaterial qualities of products, ´good deeds´ are done by consuming and absolution happens in a super market instead of a church. However, despite all this goodness, the capitalist market and production has created a growing number of serious global problems. These dynamics have created a new political subject: an enlightened consumer.
Posted on: Sun, 06 Oct 2013 09:32:15 +0000
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