ABSTRACT
The onslaught of information has long been a feature of mass culture. As Theodor Adorno remarked in 1942: If mass culture has already become one great exhibition, then everyone who stumbles into it feels as lonely as a stranger on an exhibition site. Martin Filler has traced the earliest presentations of domestic spaces to portrait paintings commissioned by the new Northern European bourgeois during the fifteenth century. “Preserved in the paintings of the early Northern Renaissance,” Filler writes, “are depictions of the ways in which the room began to become the center of a newly internalized vision of the world”. Magazines have long been a staple of the American shelter industry, dating back to the turn of the twentieth century and the rise of modern culture as synonymous with consumer media culture. Debates have continued over the cultural value of television, as have a series of specific critiques specifying the medium as inherently antithetical to architecture and design culture.
