People are afraid to merge¹, yet they stroll through the city, engulfed by its eloquent urban architecture. Illuminated by moving billboards, flickering screens, rampant advertisements, cutouts, leaflets, and various campaigns—they rush into malls and stores for all sorts of reasons. Perhaps they are seeking escape, or simply looking to warm up and enjoy the comfort of in-real-life window shopping; we all inadvertently fall into certain looping traps.

Immuneless and expectant of something special, yet trivial—something close to nothing—the agony of rife branding pokes even more insidiously from our phones. Every app seems infested with a framework of advertisements, infiltrating every moment of our daylight and nightlife.

In one thorny 2020 theory, the idea of branding or marketing oneself approaches a kind of self-prostitution. As articulated in original words: “While everyone’s personal brand becomes monetizable, the lines between prostitution and self-promotion are blurred. In 2020, everyone’s a performer, an artist, an escort, and a social worker,” Natasha Stagg allegedly claimed before quitting Instagram and smoking for good.

Let’s place a cryptic theory into our constructed reality: both, Jiajia Zhang’s and Béla Feldberg’s works at Damien & The Love Guru in Brussels slam a notoriety of references. Their works harness and study levels of social ennui—That of numbness produced by an industry obsessed with extraction and luxury, the marketing so pervasive, it warps the exterior architecture, and eventually fucks with (our) urban isolation. —You never get to feel lonely while you’re browsing through stuff online. You’ll never get to feel lonely while ordering online. As a result, you emerge from utter exposure either way, confronted with either too much or far too little.

Pick your battles, they say.

The cityscape’s facade—its composition and depth, heavy black-painted door to a club or a resto, a mascotte toy in the mall—gambling with what you think you see. A shift in scale and perspective occurs. Control and domination: Crushing.

How did we get here in the first place?
How does one get out of this in the first place?

Imagine you’re queuing for one of the most delicious hotdogs in New York City, like the one at Gray’s Papaya on the Upper West Side—and while you wait for your jiffy food, you start to feel a tinge of hesitation. It’s not that a hotdog is the problem! Faced with public commerce and exposure, with all that’s out there gaping at you—you stare back at it. It’s because brands must prioritize branding, not product, in precarity.”—“At work, we had to rebrand ourselves, too.”2 Your mind spurs with existential questions. Sigh. You start composing notes, mindmaps in your head, recklessly thinking that this might help. You’re wrong—“Like microplastics sloughing off the cheap fabrics we wear, it is around us, in us, on us, and being advertised to us, forever.³

Jiajia Zhang refers to Gruen transfer (also known as the Gruen effect)—the moment when consumers enter a shopping mall or store and, surrounded by an intentionally confusing layout, lose track of their original intentions, making them more susceptible to making impulse buys.

In my canned existence, I think of being sealed away at a distance. Like a Poughkeepsie Frozen Yogurt that you buy in one of the bodegas of New York.

Everybody gossips, fucks, drives drunk… This is a higher stratum, one of derangement brought on by wealth earned in a culture where nothing is sacred.⁴

It had all gone wrong. At long last, I had found myself vulnerable to the worst of New York City, because at 44 my life was not so different from the way it was at 24. Stubbornly and proudly, emphatically and pathetically, I had refused to grow up, and so I was becoming one of those people who refuses to grow up—one of the city’s Lost Boys. I was still subletting in Greenwich Village, instead of owning in Brooklyn Heights. I had loved everything about Yale Law School—especially the part where I graduated at 40—but I spent my life savings on an abiding interest, which is a lot to invest in curiosity. By never marrying, I ended up never divorcing, but I also failed to accumulate that brocade of civility and padlock of security—kids you do or don’t want, Tiffany silver you never use—that makes life complete. Convention serves a purpose: It gives life meaning, and without it, one is in a constant existential crisis. If you don’t have the imposition of family to remind you of what is at stake, something else will. I was alone in a lonely apartment with only a stalker to show for my accomplishments and my years.⁵

Notice! Sneaky brands steal my attention, which I so involuntarily provide. Out in the open. Your mall design and cool shopping apps make me wanna buy it all, although I know it’s all wrong. That I’m so wrong.

Whenever I woke up, night or day, I’d shuffle through the bright marble foyer of my building and go up the block and around the corner where there was a bodega that never closed. I’d get two large coffees with cream and six sugars each, chug the first one in the elevator on the way back up to my apartment, then sip the second one slowly while I watched movies and ate animal crackers and took trazodone and Ambien and Nembutal until I fell asleep again. I lost track of time in this way. Days passed. Weeks. A few months went by. I ordered delivery from the Thai restaurant across the street, or a tuna salad platter from the diner on First Avenue. I’d wake up to find voice messages on my cell phone from salons or spas confirming appointments I’d booked in my sleep. I always called back to cancel, which I hated doing because I hated talking to people.⁶

Meanwhile, men and women in suits, tourists, and teens still queue for Gray’s Papaya’s no-mess, no-fuss hot dogs on the Upper West Side. And some people are afraid to merge and isolate themselves, faintly believing this is what makes them feel better. And maybe it will. To separate is to deter and withhold whatever does not need to include oneself in order to be considered accountable—to appear or render meaningless. …stores, malls, and shopping centers of all kinds… streets and venues, as well as our constructed online verses, all contribute to our own apathetic phoniness.

We may also invent a new term for “it’s over.” We may create yet another meme, a new post-era content—something to cover our previous tracks that reek of crassness and delusion, something far beyond mediocre broadcasting—to say, to find a way toward and press EXIT.

And I wonder, but then again, it may be only A Rare Kind of Trust—the kind we can still hold toward ourselves, tightly gripped in our hands.

Text by Filip Jakab

1 Bret Easton Ellis, Less Than Zero, 1985, Picador, London, p.1
2 Natasha Stagg, Artless, 2023, Semiotext(e), South Pasadena, CA, p.87
3 Natasha Stagg, Artless, 2023, Semiotext(e), South Pasadena, CA, p.95
4 Ottessa Moshfegh, Introduction, Bret Easton Ellis, Less Than Zero, 1985, Picador, London, p.8
5 Elizabeth Wurtzel, Elizabeth Wurtzel Confronts Her One-Night Stand of a Life, The Cut, January 6, 2013, online
6 Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year Of Rest And Relaxation, 2018, Penguin Books, New York, p.1