Most powerfully, though, he posits a world in which commercial and political speech have merged, in which language has become so degraded that it's used exclusively for selling. The show is divided into two parts, one featuring 21 murky gelatin silver prints, the other displaying 11 glossy color posters that mimic advertising art. The posters are separated by small metal plaques that bark out official regulations. Shorr's posters and plaques together conjure up a world in which the corporation and the government have become one. Here advertising has the force of law.
All culture is reduced to the sales pitch.
It's a premise that's hardly farfetched at a time when corporate lobbyists draft the laws that regulate their own industries, when inadequate government funding has allowed advertisers to insinuate their way into the public schools, when youth groups sell their souls to donors. Shorr's little plaques are the kind you see in waiting rooms. Below these words, repeated on each plaque, the orders vary. Playing on the government's Orwellian propensity to abuse language, the plaques usually mix a bizarre, intrusive regulation with a bankrupt political idea. Department of Entertainment and Education.