More Real Than Real: Simulation, Spectacle and the Experience of Art
"All that once was directly lived has become mere representation." (Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 1967)
Every day we encounter beautifully designed posters, teaser videos with slow motion, warm light and a crowd in ecstasy. Ccaptions promisesmemorable hapenings. After choosing the one that captured us the most, we usually enter an event that is not delivering what was put in front of us. Most of us know this feeling. And yet, the next time a polished video appears in our feed, the temptation returns.
This week, a pub in Bristol offered a strange illustration of the same pattern. In Bedminster, a neighborhood famous for its street art, one of its walls was covered with an AI-generated mural printed on vinyl. It showed the city's landmarks, but not quite. Local artists protested, and within days it was gone. Perhaps the idea was to create a moment of awe, something people would stop and photograph. What appeared instead was an image of a city that does not exist.
The overpromised event and the mural of a city that isn't there belong to the same story. Both are images that no longer need a reality behind them.
What happens to the experience of art when the image becomes more real than the thing itself?
The Four Stages of the Image
In Simulacra and Simulation (1981), the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard described a world in which signs slowly lose their connection to reality. He called these detached copies simulacra, and he traced their path through four stages:
The image reflects a reality.
The image masks and distorts a reality.
The image masks the absence of a reality.
The image has no relation to any reality at all; it is its own pure simulacrum.
Read this list with a cultural event in mind, and it becomes uncomfortably familiar. At the first stage, the photograph of an exhibition shows the exhibition. At the second, the lighting is dramatic, the angles are clever, and the room looks fuller than it was. At the third, the image hides the fact that there is little behind it: a strong campaign for a weak event. At the fourth, the image no longer needs an event at all. It circulates, gathers likes and builds a reputation on its own. The poster becomes the product.
Baudrillard called the result the hyperreal: a condition in which the simulation feels more real than the real. His most famous image comes from an old fable about an empire whose mapmakers drew a map as large as the territory itself. Today, he wrote, the map comes first; it is the territory that fades beneath it.
The teaser video is the map. The evening is the territory.
From Being to Appearing
More than a decade before Baudrillard, Guy Debord had already named the society that would produce these images. In The Society of the Spectacle (1967), he wrote that the spectacle "is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images."
This is the crucial point. The spectacle is not simply too much advertising. It is a way of living together. People begin to relate to one another, and to culture, through the images they exchange. Where to go, whom to follow, what counts as a good night out: all of it is decided at the level of the picture.
Debord also described a historical slide: from being to having, and from having to appearing. First, a good life meant a lived experience. Then it meant owning things. Finally, it came to mean looking as if one had them.
Cultural events have followed the same path. An evening of art was once something to live through. Then it became something to attend, a ticket, a place to be seen. Now it is increasingly something to appear to have attended: a story, a reel, a tagged location.
Written in 1967, this reads today like a description of social media.
The Audience in the Hyperreal
The more interesting question is not who produces these images, but what they do to the people who receive them. Three effects stand out.
They narrow our choices. Evenings are chosen on screens, and screens reward the most polished image. Spaces and artists without strong media become almost invisible, however meaningful the experience they offer. The audience believes it is choosing freely, while the range of what it can see keeps shrinking.
They rewrite our expectations. When the image comes first, it becomes the standard. The real evening is measured against its trailer, and a good, honest experience can feel disappointing simply because it does not look like its promotion. The simulation becomes the original; reality becomes the imperfect copy.
They take the place of presence. Many people now attend events partly to produce more images of them. Phones rise, stories are posted, the night is checked for how it looks. The experience becomes raw material for the next representation, and the audience is only half in the room. This last effect is the most serious. Art depends on attention. It needs bodies in a space, eyes that stay, time that is not already being edited for someone else.
There is also a structural cost. Smaller cultural spaces are pushed to compete in images against events whose images are far better than their reality. A good experience does not depend on excellent media. It should certainly never depend on media that is better than the experience itself. Yet this is precisely the competition the hyperreal imposes.
Images Without Necessity
If Baudrillard's fourth stage ever needed a machine, it now has one. An AI image is a simulacrum in the purest sense: built from millions of other images, pointing to no real place, person or moment. The Bristol mural did not misrepresent the city. It represented nothing, and dressed that nothing in the city's clothes.
Why would anyone choose this for a wall in a neighborhood full of painters? The first answer is practical. It was probably cheaper than paying artists, and certainly faster. A print can be ordered and installed in days; a painted mural of that size takes weeks of work, sketches, conversations and weather. Time and budget are real pressures, and they explain a great deal.
They do not explain everything. There is also a widespread misreading of what it means to be "tech forward." For many businesses, an AI image has become a way of signaling that they are smart, modern, even futuristic. The image is not chosen for what it shows, but for what it says about the one who chose it. In Debord's terms, this is appearing in its purest form: not being innovative, only looking as if one were.
The same consumerist reflex runs through everyday use. When tools like Midjourney first appeared, some people spent hours shaping the images they had in mind; whatever one thinks of the results, there was intention in it. Professionals still work hard to push these tools toward something meaningful. For many users, however, image-making has collapsed into a sentence typed into a chatbot and a result accepted without a second look. The tool is used because it is there. Rarely does anyone ask whether the image is needed, or what it will do to the people who have to live with it.
Resistance
And yet, Bristol reacted. Artists protested, residents complained, and the vinyl came down within days.
It is worth asking whether the same image would have caused any reaction at all if it had only appeared online. Probably very little. On a screen, it would have been one more image in an endless feed. On a real wall, in a real street, it became an intrusion.
This suggests something important: perhaps we have not fully entered Baudrillard's fourth stage, at least not mentally. When the simulacrum steps into physical space, into the places where people live and walk, something in us still resists. Artists defend their work and their role. Audiences defend a sense that the city, and the art in it, should come from someone. This is resistance in the most basic sense: an effort to keep a human identity, both as makers and as viewers.
But resistance is not the only response. Somewhere on that street, there were surely passersby who looked up and thought, oh, another AI image, and walked on. Fatigue is not the same as resistance. It is closer to surrender. The real question is which of the two will grow faster.
What the Simulation Takes from Us
Why would so many organizers, and even artists, try to appear as something they are not? Partly because visibility has become a competition of images, and algorithms reward what looks good on a screen rather than what is true in a room. The pressure is real. It does not make the result harmless.
The harm falls on the audience, and it is cumulative. One overpromised evening is a small disappointment. But audiences today go through this again and again: event after event where the campaign was better than the experience. Over time, three things happen.
Vision narrows. The only events that reach people are the ones with the strongest images, so the range of what they can imagine choosing keeps shrinking.
Standards fall. When the gap between image and reality becomes normal, people stop expecting the reality to be good. A mediocre evening is accepted because the video was nice.
Self-worth erodes. Every time people give their time, money and attention to something that did not deserve it, they learn, without noticing, that their time is not worth much. Being fooled once is an accident. Being fooled repeatedly becomes a relationship with oneself.
Perhaps the most worrying result is a loss of curiosity. Many audiences no longer ask questions. They go where the image tells them to go, and do what they are told to do. Today, the pattern is hard to miss: a polished campaign fills a venue, while a thoughtful event with a modest poster struggles to be noticed at all. This also happens in the encounters of audience with artists and their work of art. An artist with better publicity gets more attention, regardless of what they produce.
Debord described this passivity with painful precision: "The more he contemplates, the less he lives; the more he identifies with the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own life and his own desires." The spectator does not choose. The spectator is chosen for.
This is also why disappointment does not break the cycle. Baudrillard would say that in the hyperreal, what is consumed is no longer the event but the image of the event. Each disappointment is quickly covered by the next promise, the next reel, the next better-lit crowd. The simulation does not need to be believed. It only needs to be replaced.
Nor is there an easy exit through "authenticity." Keeping it real can become just another image; raw-looking photos and deliberately unpolished videos are now one of the most successful aesthetics on the market. No cultural space, Hangar included, stands outside the world of images. The most any of us can claim is modest: images that do not promise more than the room can give. Whether audiences still know how to tell the difference is another matter.
The mural in Bristol lasted only a few days, because people refused it. That refusal is worth taking seriously, but it is fragile. Resistance needs curiosity, and curiosity is exactly what the spectacle wears down.
The question the mural leaves behind will last much longer: in a culture that increasingly prefers the image, will we still make room for the real thing?
References
Baudrillard, J. (1994). Simulacra and simulation (S. F. Glaser, Trans.). University of Michigan Press. (Original work published 1981)
Debord, G. (2014). The society of the spectacle (K. Knabb, Trans.). Bureau of Public Secrets. (Original work published 1967)
Bristol24/7. (2026, September 22). Artists heavily criticise AI-generated mural.
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