The Hermitage is a massive residential property under construction in Kowloon (Hong Kong). I was living just next to its location, so I could see the progress of its development and I was very intrigued by the inside. Few weeks ago, I was walking in the adjacent Olympian shopping mall and I discovered that The Hermitage opened its showroom to the public. It went beyond all my expectations and was by far the craziest thing I have seen during my stay in Hong Kong, The showroom is completely out of reality, immersing visitors into a manufactured ‘dream’-like experience.

People from Hong Kong and Asia more generally associate romantic western imagery with luxury. The Hermitage gives them all that on steroids. The showroom is entirely in marble, fake gold, crystals and mirrors. Space is very expensive in Hong Kong and most of the apartments on sale are actually very small, but no trick is spared to make the flats look bigger: lights, mirrors, smaller than usual furniture. The Hermitage showroom plays a soundtrack which is a condensed version of cheesy opera music, at the moment when the princess falls in love with the prince. They also made a dream like movie introducing the property; again everything is in gold.

Associations with symbols of prestige are heavily used to promote the apartments. Real Rolls-Royces from Europe are on display in the showroom and in the huge ads flooding the Hong Kong subway. But the most surprising is the collection of authentic Russian golden accessories displayed in introduction to one of the showroom. Models of high end apartments made of crystal-like material are then presented in the same fashion than the golden artefacts, in case someone didn’t appreciate well enough there intrinsic value. Videos mix images of the property and the original Hermitage in St Petersburg, making it somehow confusing, but the point is of course not to make it all rational, we are in a dream. The property is not so central in Hong Kong but the issue has been cleverly resolved by introducing the concept of ‘golden circle’ which happens to enclose the Hermitage property and the most famous central landmarks, a wonderful marketing imagery.

Tens of clerks and estate agents stand in the many showrooms, all very polite and nice. One was explaining to a potential buyer that the Hermitage is also the biggest museum in Paris, not so right, but who cares anyway.

The showroom itself is not even in The Hermitage building, it is just a temporary site reproducing with some liberty the final product, and you can even visit reproductions of the lifts! When you visit the fake flats all decorated in a very heavy romantic style, red sections are displayed on the floor to indicate space that will actually not be part of the asset on sale, so potential buyers still get the correct information, but from a manufactured dream that can completely submerge them. It is a fake of a fake to use postmodernist terminology. I would recommend anyone to visit the showroom, you will have a great time and it is even better than Hong Kong Disneyland or casinos from Macau!

Ok, this entertainment complex is clearly fake and tasteless.

Here are some nice Portuguese ceramic tiles on a concrete building.

The Lisboa casino dates from the 60s. Its retro architecture is refreshing and its name is directly related to the history of Macau.

Its recent extension, the Grand Lisboa looks more like a building coming from space, and the inside is not so interesting.

Here is a view of Macau mixing old and new.

Macau is not only about Portuguese vestiges, you can also find some nice examples of Chinese architecture, such as in the A-Ma temple. Its history is by the way wonderfully illustrated in the Maritime museum just next door.

I like the way they restored the St Dominic’s Church, they kept its relative simplicity.

Here is the Venetian casino and hotel in Macau, similar to the one in Las Vegas, but bigger. The one in Las Vegas is still a little better I think; its sections are a little more diverse. It is a fake reproduction of Venice of course, and its theme has not any connection with Macau, at the opposite of the Lisboa casino. It features however an amazing number of details that reproduce relatively faithfully the ones in Venice. The entertainments inside the casino such as opera acts and classical music are of good quality and not fake at all. I’m not saying it is like Venice, but it is not a totally fake place.

If you are interested in the idea of travelling in fake places, you can also check out the artistic video I did a while ago about Las Vegas..

Thanks to the team of the Philosophy Now magazine for having kindly accepted to publish my paper and for their extremely professional proofreading!

“Slurb” by Marina Zurkow, 2009

“Forest of Cement” by Jisoo Kim, 2007

The exhibition ‘Dreams of Progress’ held in July at the Westminster Reference Library is looking at our past ideals. I’m curating the exhibition and I am reading a lot of books related to the subject of Progress. We don’t fully realize today how the idea of a European Union was one of the most important ideal of the 20^th century. People suffered of centuries of wars in Europe, tried so many times to stop what seemed an inexorable repetition of bloody confrontations. Not long after the First and the Second World wars, what has probably been the lowest point of history, came the most ambitious project, the only one that could cure Europe for good, the European Union. We take now for granted peace in Europe. It appears so fundamental and natural. The project of the European Union has not been built by romantic people bored in their bourgeois living rooms. It has been made by necessity. The real ideal behind the euro is not to make international corporations richer, it is that commerce between nations prevent them from going to war. Democracy and freedom is not so much about individualistic rhetoric, but is an effective way to prevent a country’s elite to declare war without a real necessity for its population. The point is that all of this is working! After centuries of blood, we have now found a way to prevent war. It has not been easy to force nations to cooperate, especially the nations, or should I say the past Empires, of Europe. So, after generations of people painfully building this great project, what is our vision?

In his book “The Divided West”, Jürgen Habermas defines the following identity founding characteristics of Europe:

• Commitment to peace as a result of the historical experience of loss
• Social privatization of faith: The only way for Europe to escape war is the strict separation between nations and religions. For those who don’t understand why, look at the history.
• The priority of the state to the market: free market is perceived more as a mean for social wealth than as an end by itself. States embody the more important concepts of citizenship, justice and freedom.
• The primacy of social solidarity over “merit”, inherited from labour movement and Christian social thought.
• Sensitivity for violations of personal and bodily integrity (e.g. rejection of death penalty)
• Reflexive distance toward nationalism, resulting from the growing distance from imperial domination and colonialism
• Awareness of the paradoxes of progress. Europe has a rich history of traditions. ‘Progress’ resulted in the extinction of many traditions, some being more beneficial than what they have been replaced with. There is thus this awareness among Europeans that technological progress doesn’t always mean better living.

As it is explained in this article from Le Monde (in French), the young French generation is naturally European. I assume it is also the case for all young generations in Europe. It’s culture is European, it constantly travels across Europe and makes connections way beyond the borders of nations. The  identity characteristics listed above are I think shared by most European citizens. I believe in them. But what I saw this weekend is a lazy, spoiled, old and selfish continent. What is your opinion?

In his book “Vinyl Leaves, Walt Disney World and America”, Stephen M. Fjellman analyses Disney World and how it incarnates a postmodern society based on consumerism. Here is a summary of his thoughts.

In the introduction, Mr. Fjellman makes a reference to the book “Brave New World” from Aldous Huxley. The book describes an utopian dictatorship of happiness. “A good way to make sure that people police themselves is to get them to believe essentially the same stories about what the world is and why the way it is is good, true and beautiful. The world needs to be described, and it needs to be justified by arguments about nature, philosophical principle, history, or the gods. People will find their place in such a world. They will learn what hopes they might reasonably hold for themselves.” The argument of Mr. Fjellman is that it is exactly what our society is trying to achieve, not necessary consciously, but as a matter of fact. His description of Disney World might seem harsh, but it doesn’t contain any anger – the author seems actually to be a fan of Disney World – it is just a realistic description from an anthropologist point of view, not trying to point out guilty corporations, but just stating the facts and how society works.

A Disney shop

Disney is a major corporation that has a vested interest in promoting a consumerist society. Disney World is not merely a collection of fantasies for children, it is actively advocating the utopia of happy consumerism.  “Our lives can only be well lived (or live at all) through the purchase of commodities. As the commodity form becomes a central part of culture, so culture becomes available for use in the interest of commodification, as a legitimation for the entire system. We must be taught that it is good, reasonable, just, and natural that the means necessary for life are available only through the market”.  In this context, here is how Disney world is defined: “Walt Disney World produces, packages and sells experiences and memories as commodities.” Visitors know that when going in Disney World, they get into a place where all their activities are controlled and conditioned (e.g. queues, soundtracks all over the parks, visual magnets like the Cinderella castle) . They know that their experiences and souvenirs will be manufactured and probably not so different from the ones of another visitor. But they still buy the package because they know they will get a very enjoyable experience.

Queues in the Epcot Test Track ride sponsored by GM

Stephen M. Fjellman notices the following:

• Rides are often experiences during which the visitors are inactive. The only way for visitors to do something, take part in the magic, is at the exit, when they land to the souvenir shops. What is purchased then is not only the souvenir, but the only mean for the visitor to take an active part in the magical experience.
• The sentence “If we can dream it, we can do it” from the EPCOT Future world is ambiguous. Who is the ‘we’? Mr. Fjellman argues that the first ‘we’ means us, but that the second one most probably means ‘corporations’. EPCOT is promoting the pursue of new technologies for human good (if not, goods), but even if we dream it, most of us will not build the new technologies, only the corporations having the ability to do so will. So, the message is actually to trust corporations and their technologies.
• Often at Disney World, rides about the future are actually about the past future: the future as it was imagined few decades ago (e.g. space mountain, Spaceship earth). This paradox is tolerated by the otherwise perfectionism of the Disney imagineers because it achieves one objective: provide reasonable credibility to the statement that corporate technology is good for humanity.  Real future technologies are too controversial, old ones are better suited.
• Animatronics are part of the Disney World experience since its creation. Why are they so important to Disney? The idea to imitate humans with robots could be seen as frightening. But again, the goal of Disney is to promote industrial consumerism. Many of its rides are sponsored by corporations such as GM, Exxon and Kraft. All are heavily involved in high technology. So, the human face of animatronics and their harmless appearance makes technology friendly and acceptable to consumers.
• The Disney movies and the Disney rides often alternate scaring or frightening scenes with cute and happy ones. Bruno Bettelheim made the point that this technique used in fairytales is useful for the kids education, it is a “symbolic presentation of difficult and dangerous psychosocial contradictions”. But the goal of Disney is not to educate kids, it is to make money.  Scaring children to then make them happier is a good way to sell more cinema tickets and merchandising .

Vinyl leaves from Animal Kingdom

How come these kind of messages are not consciously detected by visitors? According to the book, it is thanks to cognitive overload and decontextualization.

• Someone is constantly overloaded by stimuli in Disney World, “it is with the overriding of visitors’ capacities for making discriminations that Disney metathemes may take effect.”
• Disney World is a patchwork of enchanted medieval castles, colonial history, future technologies, Moroccan markets, zoos, characters from Disney cartoons, American presidents, rides sponsored by car manufacturers, Mt Everest, astronomy, dinosaurs and so on. It is the world summarized. But the trick is that if you remove an element from its context, it loses a lot of its meaning. “By pulling meanings out of their contexts and repackaging them in bounded informational packets, decontextualization makes it difficult for people to maintain a coherent understanding about how things work.” It is then easier to tell the Disney history: “Idealized United States as heaven, history is decoration. Colonialism was fun, the colonized cute (but a little stupid). How nice if they could all be like us – with kids, a dog, and GE appliances – in a world whose only problems are avoiding Captain Hook, the witch’s apple.”
• “The Disney strategy is to juxtapose the real and the fantastic (real birds mixed with fake sounds of birds), surrounding us with the mix until it becomes difficult to tell which is which.  A kind of euphoric disorientation is supposed to set in as we progressively accept the Disney definition of things. We are asked to submit to a wilful suspension of disbelieve in the ostensible interest of a complete entertainment experience.”

I personally love Disney world. I agree with the analysis of Mr. Fjellman, but after all, this is not so shocking for someone already leaving in such a consumerist society. What is much more worrying is the trend to build everything like Disney World: hotels, cities, even museums. The risk is to forget that Disney World is only one vision of an utopian society of happiness, a corporate one. Life is so much more than that.

Do you think this article is fair to Disney World? Would you like to defend the park against some of the claims made here? Or do you think the reality is even darker?

The Tour Eiffel from the World's Fair of 1900

I’ve read recently the excellent book from Jay Winter “Dreams of Peace and Freedom – Utopian Moments in the 20^th Century“. It is part of my curatorial homework for the exhibition “Living the Dream of Modernity” that I’m preparing to launch very soon. Here is a summary.

Mr. Winter understands utopia as a discourse in two contradictory parts. An utopia is an ideal in complete discontinuity with the reality. But the ideal can only be expressed with what is known. Thus, the utopia necessary tells about the historical context of its authors. “Utopia is a fantasy about the limits of the possible, a staging of what we take for granted, what is left unsaid about our current social conventions and political cultures. Those who expose these silences, often playfully, begin to disturb the contradictions in the way we live.” [Louis Marin, Utopiques]

The book focuses on the loosely defined ‘minor utopias’, the utopias that have not been the cause of major wars and cruelty, e.g. 20^th century totalitarian regimes.

Jay Winter identifies  the following utopias:

-          Visions of Peace in 1900. Throughout the world, many groups declared their commitment to the idea that war could be eradicated. 3 examples:

o   Albert Kahn created the “Archives of the Planet”, films and photographs from many parts of the world, to help people “see that their interests should be directed towards the benefit of humanity as a whole. For this they need more than abstract knowledge, but contact with the world. This contact will show the variety of experience and contradict simple formula about the world”

o   The world’s fair of 1900 in Paris, based on the idea that war would be unnecessary in a world based on international commerce.

o   Jean Jaurès and socialist pacifism took the opposite direction, peace was impossible under a system defending property and privilege. A system of states resting on class inequalities would necessary clash.

All those visions were unlikely to materialize, “because the men and women who framed them could not evade who they were: European citizens of an imperial system controlling the globe, a system about to detonate the most devastating war in history”.

-          Perpetual Peace in 1919. After the first World War, long-lasting peace was still the primordial goal. The conviction was that self-determination would put this time a definitive end to war. Self-determination is the capability for “people to determine their political future in their own territory. Take away the imperial element in international affairs, and armed conflict would simply be unnecessary”. It was in the agenda of the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 but was still the prerogative of the imperial countries. You cannot be imperial and democratic at the same time.

-          The illuminations of 1937. The hope of the Paris world’s fair of 1937 was that science and technology would make humanity progress cooperatively. Democratizing light and electricity was the perfect symbolic: a materialization of the 18^th century enlightenment. Meanwhile, science was playing a central role in the military preparation of the second World War.  The fair was in fact a desperate invocation, signs of its fate are greatly detailed in the book.

-          The work of René Cassin on the Declaration of Human Rights, in the middle of the second World War, seems like a paradox. “But utopias have the tendency to appear at the worst times, when they are the least likely to be realized”. The declaration was motivated by the believe that peace could be secured only if it was based on a set of international commitments on human rights. States respecting the rights of their citizen would not be willing to go to war so easily.

-          Liberation of the 1968. Jay Winter describes a shift in this period during which the ideal of individual freedom takes over the one of collective independence (e.g. states, trade unions). He describes the liberation theology school funded by Gustavo Gutiérrez as well as the student revolts in Paris and Berlin. Came from those movements the notion of ‘autogestion’, people can solve their problems without national governments (e.g. life in small communities, humanitarian organizations such as Medecins sans frontieres). A chapter is also dedicated to the Prague Spring and the theatre of Vaclav Havel.

-          Global citizenship in 1992. “Global citizens are emerging out of an array of transnational social forces animated by environmental concerns, human rights, hostility to patriarchy, and a vision of human community based on the unity of diverse cultures seeking an end to poverty, oppression, humiliation, and collective violence.” [Richard Falk] Even though the importance of this movement is undeniable, most of international institutions are still the result of cooperation between nations, far from being bypassed.

The book was very useful to read. It helps having a minimum of historical context on utopias and to understand how come such obvious things such as international corporations, Human rights, the European Union and Greenpeace exist.

Jay Winter manages to stay very detailed and neutral when describing the utopias and why they were biased, while still being an advocate of them. All the utopias described above played an important role in history and how we perceive the world today. They are the result of individuals still being able to envision a world beyond the injustices and atrocities of their times. Without them, no progress would have been possible.