Gargantua: Manufactured Mass Culture

Rabelais’s tale the giant prince Gargantua is a vast and inescapable cluster of qualities and activities; his violence, greed and incontinence are incomparable. In the old giant’s size, ubiquity, gluttony, vast knowledge and warlike nature, we can recognize qualities of our contemporary culture.

In this brilliant polemic on our visual mass culture, Stallabrass argues that culture’s status as a commodity is the most important thing about it, affecting its form, its relation to the viewer and ...