Milan Knížák. Destroyed Music, 1965

Capitalism is what produces more than a billion people going hungry or malnourished or vulnerable to famines in an age of abundant food production as never witnessed in human history. It is what keeps one in three persons from having access to safe potable water. It is what gives preferential treatment to housing speculators over those needing shelter. It is the development of profitable and ever deadlier wars, with ever more devastating weaponry, the diffusion of mass imprisonment, mass displacement, mass migration, mass death and vast riches and political privileges for a small fraction of humanity.

Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro, Socialist States and the Environment: Lessons for Eco-Socialist Futures

Parvine Curie (*1936) - Babel, 1990

[T]he increasingly rapid rate at which images are distributed and consumed in late capitalism necessitates a corresponding increase in the rate that individuals assume and shed identities. Because advertisements link identity with the need to purchase products, the acceleration of visual culture promotes the hyper-consumption associated with late capitalism. […]

Put differently, capitalism needs schizophrenia, but it also needs egos. The contradiction is resolved through the acceleration of the temporal rhythm of late capitalist visual culture. This type of acceleration encourages weak egos that are easily formed, and fade away just as easily…The “Ideal-I"s that the capitalist media offer are perhaps even less complex than the infantile imago of the child’s own reflection. Needless to say, such an ego wears out fast, inspiring the consumer to shop around for another one.

— Jonah Peretti, Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Contemporary Visual Culture and the Acceleration of Identity Formation/Dissolution

The Tesla World Light (2017) dir. Matthew Rankin

Rocco and His Brothers, 1960 (dir. Luchino Visconti)

Gotthard Graubner, Unnoscriptd, 1964, Oil, diluted, on cardboard 41.5 x 32 cm