For the 1939 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows Corona Park, New York, Salvador Dalí created a surrealist funhouse called Dream of Venus. This installation, which included sound and performance, aimed at a controversial sensation, a truly surreal experience for its visitors. Labelled as “tacky, Oceanside amusement park attraction” and wrapped up by consumer commodity, however, Dalí’s surrealist funhouse is been said to have lost much of its provocative power. This contribution investigates to what extent the avant-garde aesthetics and politics became part and parcel of American consumer culture, commodity culture and capitalism. Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s poststructuralist analysis of the axiomatic regime of capitalism and their view on madness provides a toolbox for taking a closer look at surrealist (vain?) efforts to combat capitalist dominion
