ABSTRACT
The co-optation or récupération of alternative or oppositional ideas and practices by society’s mainstream is a familiar phenomenon. Well-documented examples include the manner in which alternative lifestyles, such as the reuse of ex-manufacturing loft spaces, practised by artists since the 1950s, have become ubiquitous. Integrated into contemporary living practices, they have become nowadays merely a lifestyle choice among several, rather than a potential for a very dierent social practice (Zukin 1989). The use of provocation, mobilized in the 1920s by Dada artists as a weapon against the bourgeoisie, has become a standard tool of public relations and a means of self-promotion, exemplied by the provocative advertisements of Benetton and Calvin Klein in the last decades. Shklovsky and Brecht’s ‘de-familiarization’ and ‘estrangement’, once avant-garde instruments of formulating a cognition and consciousness of compromised daily life, have been integrated into a Disneyed, irrationalist method of adding colour, wit and surprise to otherwise vacuous and dour environments, and consequently an instrument of pacication and ‘quietism’.
