Art & Consumer Culture

Art & Consumer Culture

Jean Baudrillard’s assertion that postmodern consumer society is saturated with aesthetics to the point where art is no longer possible and that postmodern consumption should be understood as the consumption of signs. In order to illustrate these ideas the lecture will focus on artists who have celebrated the commodification of art, have fetishised the everyday and have established themselves as celebrity brands.

1. Jean Baudrillard The Object Value System: Consumption practices are based on ‘symbolic exchange’ value – that is an object’s value is related to its sign value (what it means socially, personally, individually to the consumer)

2. For Baudrillard the density, seemless, all encompassing extent of the production of images in society means that the distinction between reality and image has become effaced and everyday life has become aestheticised and so ‘art is everywhere’ - this creates a synthetic environment of desire for the consumer product

3. Artists including Jeff Koons, Sylvie Fleury and Haim Steinbach have used ready-made consumer objects as a vehicle to explore ‘commodity fetishism’ (displaced value of the product)

4. Artists including Damien Hirst and Takashi Murakami have harnessed the power of the celebrity system to expand their reach outside the world of art into the wider world of commerce and popular culture.

5. Luxury brands have employed the ‘cultural capital’ (power and social standing achieved through cultural knowledge and concepts of taste) associated with art to symbolically improve the status of the product and the consumer