What Exactly Makes Today’s Cities So Different, So Appealing?

Just What is It That Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing? A small, highly chaotic collage by Richard Hamilton from 1956 turns out to be one of the icons after seven decades Revealing What is and what does Western culture look like? In dozens of online places, you can read about all the possible configurations and constellations of details and details of this paper work today.

Hamilton himself treated it carefully, making a new (modernized) version after over thirty years (in 1992) and of course increasing the confusion of tropes, motifs, references, symbols, etc.

Why not replace the title "houses/apartments" with something bigger? Cities, for example. The title (is it true that it is immediately charmingly ironic?) Would then read: What actually makes today's cities so different, so attractive? 

Before we allow the crowded experts from an infinite number of disciplines and industries to speak, waste fifteen seconds reading the classics of the bourgeois past:

“Dionysus:

Have your senses Ariadno!

You have small ears, you have your ears:

Hear – that wise word

Don't you have to hate each other before to make love?

I'm your maze...” 

(F. Nietzsche, Dionysian dithyrambs, trans. S. Wyrzykowski, Warsaw, 1904).

Why add Nietzsche's madness to this collage? Once we have informed ourselves about the "symbolic" and historical significance of every detail in the interiors hastily invented by Hamilton, we will understand why it is the Moon, it is Jupiter that rubs in them with canned hams, vacuum cleaners, computers and comics, in the end we will have to notice to what extent these houses hold on to the power of the gender stereotype. The sex is so grotesque in search of a clear attribute that it reaches out to the way of thinking. Nietzsche's idea that I and the inside of the situation in which I find myself are the same is equally vivid and capricious and can lead towards (how ecological!) Assumptions that I am unable to untangle myself, distance myself, distinguish myself from the city. 

And the tangle of opportunity and danger surrounding us breathes in its own Dionysian rhythm, which freely mixes what seems irreconcilable to us. 

Graphics: Richard Hamilton, Just What is It That Makes Today's Homes So Different, so Appealing? 1956, collage, 26 cm × 24.8 cm