Lurie’s collages equated news of suffering with advertising triviality.

Evidence

Advertisements for Revlon Beautyglo driven into the heart of a story on a leper colony in Africa. Life magazine taken to its final ultimate, absurd, and frightening conclusion, pain and death given no more space and attention than pictures of Elsa Maxwell’s latest party. And all of us spectators at our own death, hovering over it all in narcotized detachment, bored as gods with The Bomb, yawning over The Election, coming to a stop at last only to linger over the tender dream photos of Marilyn. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 143

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The compression ‘pain and death given no more space and attention than pictures of a party’ plus ‘all of us spectators at our own death in narcotized detachment’ is a genuinely disturbing, dense observation about media flatness that anticipates a whole critique of information overload decades early.