CONCEPTUAL CONSUMABLES

Art is really the ultimate consumable. Experiencing it yourself is 
the very act that devalues it. If you buy a toaster that works well, 
you keep on using it. But nobody stops watching movies, listening to 
music, reading books, etc. etc. just because they've found one that 
they like. Sure they're more likely to watch/listen/read that work 
again, but inevitably they'll go on searching for new works that are 
more valuable to them simply for the fact that they haven't 
experienced them before. So enormous numbers of people work to feed 
us a constant stream of new art, spending vast amounts of time and 
money, and when they hit on something people like, making vast 
amounts of money in return. The old art withers away, left behind on 
the trail marched by generations long forgotten, with but a 
selection of works dragged along as an example of culture, of the 
art that makes us what we think we are.

But really art is just a tool we use invoke emotion in ourselves, a 
mind-trick on ourselves that we're all naturally addicted to. The 
favoured art is the favoured emotion; what society wants to feel. A 
substitute for whatever inner dream we're trying to remember, or 
forget.

Yet the precise emotions don't matter, all that matters is that they 
change, decade-to-decade, generation-to-generation, so that products 
like that toaster can be designed to match a fashion. Formal, funky, 
sleek, crisp. So that it too is rooted to a time by way of whatever 
irrelevent emotion it's designed to inspire. Bombarded constantly by 
the desperate efforts of endless artists and designers to push new 
art at us, we barely even notice devices like our toaster singing in 
tune with it all, much less feel the emotive effect that those 
anonymous designers try to put into them. Yet what we do notice is 
when that emotion is out of place, reflecting a time passed, and so 
we know it's old, needs to be replaced.

By making the toaster art, the manufacturer makes it a consumable. 
But whereas we won't pay much to see a movie or a song, we value a 
device with all the functionality that it provides, yet as an 
artwork we also see it as a consumable. The more artistic it is, the 
more consumable it is, so whether it's a toaster, a smartphone, or 
even a computer operating system, we're always still looking and 
paying for something new. For something that looks like how we're 
supposed to feel.

 - The Free Thinker