Commerce’s realness invaded the exhibition because consumer capitalism required it

Evidence

Part of the shock of the Egyptians came from just how ‘real’ the street claimed to be. Not simply that the paint was made dirty, that the donkeys were from Cairo, and that the Egyptian pastries on sale claimed to taste like the real thing. But that one paid for them, as we say, with real money. The commercialism of the donkey rides, the bazaar stalls and the dancing girls was no different from the commercialism of the world outside. This was the real thing, in the sense that what commercialism offers is always the real thing. The commercialism of world exhibitions was no accident, but a consequence of the scale of representation they attempted and of the modern, consumer economy that required such entertainment. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 74

Categorization

• XREF: Links to the ‘Grafting & Growth’ and ‘On Sacrifice’ reading lines — both are about how material/commercial/ritual apparatus shapes perceived reality; also evokes Walter Benjamin’s arcades work.