Despite my best efforts to ignore the cancer that is reality television, our Workshop centred a discussion around ‘lawyer’ Gina Liano, a ‘Real’ Housewife of Melbourne. We agreed that she is an ‘aspirational figure’ – something that is at the forefront of the culture.

‘Reality television’ could not be further from reality; it’s a hoax, like God and WWE. So why do so many mindless people aspire to be like the people on these shows?

In this age of celebrity-everything, many live in a world of fantasy. Celebrities represent our desires and we know we cannot compete with them. So as a defence mechanism, we use things like Tumblr and Instagram to pretend like we are a part of their world.

Gina Liano represents everything these people ‘aspire’ to be; famous, glamorous, rich, successful, etc. She is not the only one; reality television stars have taken over the world.

But this isn’t just a problem with reality television. You see this throughout the mainstream; there’s ‘The Aspirational Figure’, The Aspirational Movie’, The Aspirational Song’, The Aspirational Novel’. Art has been destroyed because this is where we are – there are no thinkers at the forefront of the conversation.

One uses art to create art. Although in today’s generation, one uses art (the aspiration), pretend they are creative (using Tumblr/Instagram), then complain when inevitably nobody cares about them. And nobody cares because there are literally millions of them thinking they have something interesting and/or important to say.