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The beach concept

pre packaged-utopia for the hardworking proletariat

Key questions

1. Where does the idealized image of the beach comes from?
   1. What is always the case or is there an history of the phenomena? (vintage pictures 1928)
   2. Is there some work around it to make it the symbol of holidays, heavily marketed and thus crafted image?
      1. Most of the beach you see in brochures are nowhere near what you usually get
2. Why is the paradox (richest persons wanting dreaming of the poorest places, i.e Caribbeans) so consistent?
   1. selling the concept more than the physical beach itself?

Weird constants

• there is NEVER a local on the picture EXCEPT if he is serving a non local

Places to witness it

• computer background?
• symbol of travel agencies?

To organize

• A perfect beach isn't that perfect
  • not especially fun
  • not sustainable
• The idea of consuming a communitarian dream? isn't the never crowded beach always sold as "just for you" ?
• How many wouldn't like to be now on a Caribbean beach? Yet Caribbean countries are actually extremely poor
• distant dream of the hard-working westerner...
• Really so global or just westerner dream?
• Is it sad? Escaping from the production line of work so that you know can be the product on the consumption line of holidays
• In a consumerist society, the act of buying in the equivalent of the soma pill described by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World
  • consuming holidays seems to be the panacea of this model, a buying fest

References

• Museo Virtuale dei Bagni di Mare e del Turismo balneare (Italian)
• Internetseiten des Willy Scharnow-Instituts für Tourismus Aktivitäten des Instituts und das historische Archiv (HAT) (German)
• Propaganda by Edward Bernays
  • not to sell a product, but instead to sell the need for a product and in this situation, the need to relax and regenerate from the stressful office
• Les nouveaux paradis, Arte August 2009
• Philosophie : travail Arte 2009
  • in the end of the discussion, a large display of a beach is displayed to discuss this situation and concludes that in the ends it is encapsulated in the dialectic of work itself within the goal of being even more efficient when coming back.