I suspect that many of the great cultural shifts that prepare the way for political change are largely aesthetic. A Buick radiator grille is as much a political statement as a Rolls Royce radiator grille, one enshrining a machine aesthetic driven by a populist optimism, the other enshrining a hierarchical and exclusive social order.

It remains one of his iconic works and was filmed in 2001. David Cronenberg
The Atrocity Exhibition (2001) dir. In the early 1970s Bill Butler a bookseller in Brighton was prosecuted under UK obscenity laws for selling the pamphlet.

Ballard's novels and stories especially dystopian modernity bleak man-made landscapes and the psychological effects of technological social or environmental developments. His best-known works include Crash (1973) adapted into a film by David Cronenberg and the semi-autobiographical Empire of the Sun (1984) made into a film by Steven Spielberg based on Ballard's boyhood in the Shanghai International Settlement and internment by the Japanese Imperial Army during the Second Sino-Japanese War.