Currently reading: The Value of Things – Neil Cummings & Marysia Lewandowska (August/Birkhauser, 2000)
(Part 3 of 4)
Part Three: Shopping
Shopping as purchasing at leisure was incepted over 100 years ago. “Rather than merely ‘buying’ something, we are now encouraged to use every object or image to imaginatively extend ourselves: rather than making a purchase, in a sense, a purchase now ‘makes’ us.” (p.131)
On taxonomy: “The 1940s marked an ‘open’ yet classified product display system, receding sales staff and a shift towards self-service in the ‘retail revolution’.” (p.138)
Selfridges’ relation to contemporary art from Warhol themed displays to YBA associations and serpentine Gallery sponsorship is outlined. (p.152)
Container
“Contemporary plastics are perfect modern materials, ubiquitous and constantly mutating to absorb new properties; and yet our level of participation with them is inevitable kept on the level of mere consumption.” (p.155)
18th Century French economist Cantillion on the Paradox of Value: “How can the useless diamond be so expensive and water, which is so fundamental to life itself, appear so cheap?”
“A material as object can do many circuits around the commodity loop, via charity shops, car boot sales and flea markets; but eventually, unless it enters a personal or museum collection, its matter will be buried, incinerated or, in the case of plastics, reformatted. Plastics have the most potential for this kind of prolonged polymorphic life” [although limited]. (p.158)
“The museum offers a kind of quarantine to objects, a refuge beyond exchange with some symbolic resistance to fashion.” (p.161)
