Feuerbach’s judgement on the fact that his time preferred “the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, fancy to reality,” has been thoroughly vindicated by the century of the spectacle, and in several spheres where the nineteenth century preferred to keep its distance from what was already its fundamental nature: industrial capitalism. Thus it was that the bourgeoisie had widely disseminated the rigorous mentality of the museum, the original object, precise historical criticism, the authentic document. Today, however, the tendency to replace the real with the artificial is ubiquitous.
Guy Debord, Commentaires sur la société du spectacle §17