“In trying to see and hear what professional critics never see and hear, I felt as though I was attending one endless block party. In New York City, Benjamin’s mechanical reproduction has clearly become Baudrillard’s cybernetic apocalyptic ecstasy of communication, in which everything is repeated to the point of meaninglessness. Or is it rather that the massive proliferation of entertainment as compensation, as escape, as the conspicuous consumption of the flattening of history and political consequence, is what urban existence is all about?”

Michelle Wallace “Entertainment Today” (1988)