Oral Aglais "The progress"

ORAUX ANGLAIS:

Notion: Progress

I’m going to present you the topic of “the progress”. First, how could we define what is the progress? We can say that the progress is a development towards an improved or more advanced condition. The progress is essential for the development of a society; it allows to have a better way of life of people and to understand more our world. To illustrate my words I’ll talk about the consumer society through the vision of many artists. My main question is: How do artists have a critical look to the consumer society?

First we can think that consumer society would make life easier for us but in the mind of Duane Hanson the consumer society bring more drawbacks than advantages. “The Supermarket Lady” is an iconographic document on which we can see a sculpture made in 1970. The sculpture represents a caricature of a typical American low class wife from the 70’s. She is pushing her shopping cart full to the brim of junk food. She seems sick and by all the stuff she is carrying we understand that she has a really unhealthy life style. Actually, in America it was the time of the first malls and there was mass production of food products. Duane Hanson through his artwork shows the drawbacks of the consumer society and mostly of overconsumption.

Then, I’ll talk about how the consumer society is creating an addiction to the possession of material things. “Mountain O’Things” is a song from Tracy Chapman made in 1988. It is about a dreamed life where the life goal would be to own lots of things and expensive items to feel happy. This song is saying ironically that owning things make life better so it is a criticism of the consumer society. But it also criticizes the fact that owning things is useless and it’s at the expense of others. For example, in a verse, it’s written that we own things by exploiting other human beings. We understand that the consumer society creates lots of inequalities.

One of the other main aspect of the consumer society is the standardization through the overconsumption. My last document is the artwork of Andy Warhol, “Campbell’s Soup Cans”. This artwork is made of 32 different soup cans from the brand Campbell. They actually seem to be all the same but they all are one of the different flavors the brand used to propose. Through his artwork, Andy Warhol is denouncing the consumer society because it is showing us that our society has now become a mass production society, an industrial society. All these soup cans made us think to a factory that is mass producing them.

To conclude, in the eye of some artists our society has become a consumer society where we talk more and more about overconsumption and they have chosen many different ways to show that it can’t be a full progress and that it have more hidden drawbacks than what we believe.

...