It is a somewhat curious statement to claim that “it is left to high fashion to take up the role that fine art has all but abandoned. While much of fine art has succumbed to the ‘passion for the realÂ’, high fashion remains the last redoubt of Appearance and Fantasy.” But still, this article about a photo spread entitled “State of Emergency” in the Italian edition of Vogue (from some time last year) is quite interesting (even though I don’t necessarily agree with aspects of it; and despite sentences like “The Atrocity Exhibition, like ‘State of EmergencyÂ’, is devoid of any decipherable intent; the oneiric juxtapositions in BallardÂ’s and MeiselÂ’s work seemed to be conceived of as neutral re-presentations of the substitutions and elisions made by the mediatised unconscious.”). It might be enlightening to read this article after or before a recent article in New Yorker magazine about the TV show ‘24’, which, of course, runs on Fox, the network for the reptile brain. I certainly would not have imagined ten years ago to live in times, where large parts of the population in a democratic country believes that there really is nothing wrong with torture.