OMA/Rem Koolhaas, The ¥E$ regime, 2000

The week of the attack, The Economist printed a manifesto in favor of globalization: Pro Logo, with a red and black cover in reply to Naomi Klein’s No Logo. On 9/11, Bin Laden would produce his own antiglobal manifesto with homicidal violence and advertising genius, giving visual expression to the conflict between those who say ¥E$ to the homogeneization of the planet and those who send an SOS for a world in crisis. Against the subversive motto of Barbara Kruger – I shop therefore I am –, and the diffusion of brands worldwide, there is growing abstention: the ‘no shop’ of the symbolic guerrillas of the Adbusters or the gallery locked with tin sheet by Santiago Sierra to protest against the intrusion of commerce on art, ironically similar to the shielding of shop windows before an anticapitalist demonstration in London. Against the obscene autonomy of the logo, the staging of the war against advertising pollution, with a sign similar to a large red X used to denounce genetically modified food. And against the drowsy acceptance of cultural and economic colonization, the absurd violence of the car bomb that forces the Bilbao shoppers to flee or of the vandal who destroys the phone booth of an expiatory logo in Buenos Aires...[+]