billboard photo essay number three: ephiphanies of consumer desire

The billboard's territorialization of public space for the cultivation of consumer desire rests on an increasingly pithy symbolic vernacular. The consumer is hailed as a savvy interpreter of the symbolic universe who is able to recognize and decode the barrage of images and text that circulates around us. We become putative members of consumer society via our capacity for aesthetic proficiency. We could say that we are no longer "mere" consumers but active producers of the very apparatuses that guarantee our integration into consumer culture in the first place. This billboard poster seems to suggest that a visit to the Mall of America is a cultural event akin to visiting Museum of Modern Art or the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, cultural venues whose acronyms and modish appeal the MOA evokes here.

The epiphany here is the "realization that there is a sweet sale” at the Mall of America “on your day off." Hence, we find delectable personal reward if we realize that consuming can sweeten our leisure time (which is implied to be somehow empty otherwise, much like the sky that provides the backdrop for the poster).

One has epiphanies when encountering the profound. Are we being asked to contemplate an afternoon of trudging round the Mall of America as a profound activity?