ABSTRACT
The ancient Judeo-Christian concept of idolatry also anticipated aspects of the current commercial domain, as reflected in Marx's appropriation of this concept to define the phenomenon of 'commodity fetishism' in what Horkheimer and Adorno later called 'the culture industry'. If commercial advertising is a modern analogue of the ancient crimes of idolatry and sophistry, it is most ironic that modern law, as Sherwin depicts it, is now beginning itself to be influenced by the imagistic techniques of the new media. The iconoclasm of law was primarily internal: it affected, first and foremost, the text of law itself, which sought to establish itself as an image-less, completely rational language, and largely succeeded in doing so, at least to most observers. The biblical prohibition against idolatry has already been reproduced in the quote from Labor above. Idolatry derives from a Greek word eidololatria meaning 'image worship'.
