Re: Robert Frank on increasing needs

[Michael Nuwer <nuwermj@xxxxxxxxx>]

ken hanly wrote:
> There is not a word in all this about the pervasive
> role of advertising. Advertising can cause people to
> feel that their existing needs can only be met by
> zillions of different products so there is no end to
> the creation of demand and hence the desire to expand
> income and thus work longer or rob more etc. is open
> ended if not infinite.

How true. "Only in the instance of an individual ad was consumption a
question _what to buy_. In the broader context of a burgeoning
commercial culture, the foremost political imperative was _what to
dream_." (Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the
Social Roots of Consumer Culture.)

Another issue of which there is not a word is that of the morality of
such attitudes. Frank could have told his friends in Paris a George
Bernard Shaw story: "A New York lady, for instance, having a nature of
exquisite sensibility, orders an elegant rosewood and silver coffin,
upholstered in pink satin, for her dead dog. It is made: and meanwhile a
live child is prowling barefooted and hunger-stunted in the frozen
gutter outside."