capitalist realism
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 3.44 in modern English
23
Scrabble Score
17
Letters
6
Syllables
10
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
An ideological framework for viewing capitalism and its effects on politics, economics, and public thought.
Uncountable
Example Sentences
- "Back in West Berlin, Rene Block thought the term 'Capitalist Realism' resonated strongly with other kinds of 'new realism' taking place there, in the shadow of the GDR. In 1971 he used the term again for a show of prints, but disappointedly […]"
- "Richter's concept of 'capitalist realism' alluded to the doctrines of socialist realism east of the border. These approaches were taken further in the actions of Happening and Fluxus artists in the wake of the student movement."
- "Following two earlier major Sigmar Polke shows, at Tate Liverpool in 1996 and Tate Modern in 2005, this extensive retrospective aims to show the German painter, film-maker and sculptor in full. A founder, with Gerhard Richter, of capitalist realism (a rejoinder to British and American pop art) in the 1960s), Polke went on to make an enormous variety of hallucinatory, poisonous, gorgeous and unsettling works that still reverberate with a strange, dark humour."
- "It captures the psychic transformation this generation has gone through: smashing through the glass at Millbank, struggling through the hard lines of the kettle, and finally piercing capitalist realism's façade: an aperture through which now flows […]"
- "With regard to The Wire, this definition has largely revolved around the capitalist realism of society, or the reality that money rules and determines everything."
- "In the face of the 'grand narrative' of capitalist realism, the film counters with a demystifying alternative story, erecting a protective shield to insulate the informed viewer from the shock effect of the neo-liberal narrative."
Etymology
Possibly coined in 1963 when it was used as the title of an art exhibition/performance in Düsseldorf, alluding to socialist realism. The term was later reused in a political philosophy context by cultural theorist Mark Fisher.