Monday, December 13, 2004

 

We Are All Consumers

It seems to me that at some point in the twentieth century the dominant metaphor for the artist switched from Producer of Commercial Product to Consumer of Consumer Products.

Producers -- Nike, say, or Prada -- define a unique style (a set of differences between their products and others that are similar) and the meaning of that style (a la Nike Go and both companies various highly sophisticated print campaigns). This is how Modern artists did it: from Picasso through Pollock: signature approaches, methods, and subjects (style) associated with worldviews (meaning of the style).

Consumers -- on the other hand -- define themselves by choosing amongst products and combining them. An individual's style is a combination of their choices in clothing, furniture, food, music, etc. People seem to feel strongly that their choices in these areas reflect not only what they like but who they are. High Fidelity's "What you like is more important than what you are like" is, in reality, synthezised. To be clear: consumers' identities are not reduced to their purchasing choices, but (ideally) acted out through them, embodied, or embedded in them and in the way they use, combine and think about their purchases. This is how Postmodern artists do it: Cindy Sherman, Matthew Barney, Damien Hirst, et al. They define themselves by combining, altering and reversing the meanings of existing cultural objects and practices -- the high art equivalent of making iTunes playlists and Amazon wish lists.

My point is not so much the periodization -- as obviously these categories messily overlap with Duchamps and Gehrys frolicking about in inappropriate decades -- as the continuity of the critiques applied to both sides of this metaphor. Convervatives, of political or artistic stripe, tend to be highly mistrustful of the Consumer. They privelege the Producer side of the relationsip, allotting to it all of the positive values: active, not passive; critical, not gullible; enlightened, not narcotized; creative, not consumptive.

It is pleasant to think that the acceptance of Postmodern art -- which by any reckoning has been underway at least 25 years -- might herald the end of these biases in regard to the wider culture. After all, we are all Consumers, every last one of us.
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