Ben Schumacher, QUARRY (link)
The cafe-concerts during the late 1800’s in Paris for the first time gathered a mixture of classes to enjoy the same form of entertainment, here the proletariat bore witness to the dress and self styling of the bourgeois and it was not long after that the petit bourgeois was born. This newly constructed class was primarily defined “in relation to the working class, and by that relation being given spectacular form.” (Clark, Painting, 238) The petit bourgeois comprised of shopkeepers and clerks were able to simulate the appearance of the bourgeois in order to distance themselves from the working class through an imaginary dominion. This new found access to knowledge of an aesthetic code (for a lower class to a higher class in the western world) is similar to access provided by the Internet regardless of class, or geographic location to aesthetic information such as street fashion which would not be available to those living outside large metropolises such as New York or Paris.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8AaaeAaeY0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivkkCEynzPs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CucQ8bUzVpY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5jujCbyhE0
Ben Schumacher lives and works in New York and was born in Kitchener, Canada. More work can be seen here: http://worse.tumblr.com/
