The sole real status attaching to a mediocre object of this kind is to have been placed, however briefly, at the very center of social life and hailed as the revelation of the goal of the production process. But even this spectacular prestige evaporates into vulgarity as soon as the object is taken home by a consumer — and hence by all other consumers too. At this point its essential poverty, the natural outcome of the poverty of its production, stands revealed — too late. For by this time another product will have been assigned to supply the system with its justification, and will in turn be demanding its moment of acclaim.
This continual process of replacement means that fake gratification cannot help but be exposed as products change, and as changes occur in the general conditions of production. Something that can assert its own unchanging excellence with uncontested arrogance changes nonetheless. This is as true of the concentrated as of the diffuse version of the spectacle, and only the system endures... Likewise every time a personification of totalitarian power is eclipsed, the illusion of community that has guaranteed that figure unanimous support is exposed as a mere sum of solitudes without illusions.
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The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord, New York: Zone Books, 1994
(Tr.) Donald Nicholson Smith
Unity and Division Within Appearances, pp. 44-46