Generation Bubble

Artificial Paradises: The Shopping Mall as an Aesthetic Category

The endgame for the benevolent authoritarianism implicit in shopping-mall hegemony is, of course, the “totally administered life” Max Weber, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer variously warned of. The mallification of all shared spaces, from airports to campus bookstores, sure seems like one more step in this direction. According to the ideology of the shopping-mall aesthetic, every bystander or traveler is a potential consumer. Our previously unique and interesting spaces have been Haussmannized into vast boulevards of cheaply-made goods, wherein government officials and market researchers conspire to keep us shopping so that we may always be disgorging both precious dollars and vital demographic data, the blood and lymph of the contemporary body economic.