From Antonioni

"We are saddled with a culture that hasn't advanced as far as science."

"Scientific man is already on the moon, and yet we are still living with the moral concepts of Homer."

"We live in a society that compels us to go on using these concepts, and we no longer know what they mean."

"I can never understand how we have been able to follow these worn-out tracks laid down by panic in the face of nature."

(Michelangelo Antonioni)

The Caveman is You

"But the one thing you should not do is to suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY."

(Ezra Pound)

"Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century."

(Marshall McLuhan)

"The transition from capitalism to socialism means, according to Marx, 'the ending of pre-history' - the transition from the uncontrolled to the fully conscious development of mankind. To understand society in its final capitalist phase one needs a precise insight into the causality and interrelationships between the growth of the material productive forces and the social relations of production."

(Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labor: A Critique of Epistemology)

"We are saddled with a culture that hasn't advanced as far as science."

(Michelangelo Antonioni)

These ads are a biting and perceptive commentary. They are precise portraits of what is here called "postmodern living": the persistence of the pre-modern in the modern, of the pre-historic within history.