Hyperreality Bites

Vancouver, Washington 1973

"You could say that the social is just like the sense of taste in American cuisine. It is a gigantic dissuasion from the taste of food: its savor is, as it were, isolated, expurgated and resynthesized in the form of burlesque and artificial sources. This is flavor, just as there was once cinematic glamour: erasing all personal character in favor of an aura of the studio and the fascination of models. Likewise for the social: just as the function of taste is isolated in the sauce, the social is isolated as a function in all the therapeutic sauces in which we float." --Jean Baudrillard, Fatal Strategies (1983)