The thrust of modern society with all of its ills is the removal of sacredness from all things. In our television-driven culture, sacredness is exchanged for brand development. A vestige of sacredness survives as the erotic allure of the product, its commodified "essense": the scent of freshness, the coolness of rugged self-sufficiency, the exoticism of a western adaptation on an ethnic art form.
The very concept of sacredness being a removable aspect of a thing is new. If it is a detachable quality, separate from the thing which it inhabits, what is it, really? We experience some revulsion at the sight of a symbol stripped of its proper context, raped of its sacredness. Appropriation of a cultural symbol is a delineation of a multidimensional source material. It seeks to find the emotionally satisfying or titillating part of an intranslatable experience and reproduce that experience in a flattened-out, safe form, for profit in a rapidly changing marketplace whose short attention spans will again drive the push for new sources of coolness and packaged cultural difference.
Read the full article at http://dangeroustosociety.angelfire.com/choice.html.
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