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.
