Pleasure in Consumption vs. Pleasure in Art

It seems as though the whole edifice of consumption rests on the individual’s free search for pleasure. Advertising and marketing would have the consumer believe in the possibility of fulfilling every need and desire, assembly lined designed to the individual. Business gurus tout the values of diversity and the broad range of options available to satisfy every need. Choices created by the detailed study of consumer psychology. Studies capable of identifying and creating those choices not even the consumers new they had. We choose between extra chunky, extra smooth, extra thin, and extra thick. Statistcs are compiled to discover the consumers pleasure and then, in a slight of hand, markets the profitable general as if to the singular.

This type of diversity is in reality misdirection. It is in fact a starkly limiting range of objects that are available through a starkly limiting amount of venues and distributors. The variety of colors, frames, and increasingly more and better accessories, wider and better interiors do not constitute a real choice when a truly different car is not allowed into the market. Electric cars, diesel cars, hydrogen cars. The reoccurrence of new models is a diversion from the possibilities of alternative cars or alternative forms of transportation. Less profitable alternatives are either unimagined or ignored.

When a value system is derived from the economy, business turns itself into metaphysics. It justifies its technique and its production by deriving its morals from the necessity of profit. No longer taking a transcendent system of values from religion, which has the ability to self justify life without recourse to a system of numerical gain, morals take their cue from business, which is very bad morality. Murray Bookchin would characterize it as grow or die.

The economic metaphor infiltrates every thing. Money, the base equalizer between unequal things, penetrates all thought. And as a result it is the basis of language. What we hold true is converted into the logic of capital.

Business values have in part been determined and influenced by the avante garde. Diversity, pluralism, schizophrenia, permanent revolution, rebellion, radicality, counterculture, self empowerment, the elemination of struture, senuality, these are the catch words of postmodernity. The decadence of counterculter that once constituted its rebellion from the status quo and its independence from the given facts is now a simple extravagance to the gargantuous excess and waste of the cooperate monstrosities who control every aspect of what we otherwise see, hear, buy, and eat. Art is incapable of battling its integration. By its thingness, its very objecthood, its sensuality, it appears to be more of the same voice of teachnologically mass marketed images. It tries to rupture the images of mass media but is incapabale of doing so with a media so comfortable with the technique of dislocation and fragmentation.

Any recourse to an image that is polished, fully rendered does not constitute an alternative either (the New Master championed by Donald Kuspit). The consumer society’s images are a balance between fragmentation, the montage, the unfinished and dislocated, while simultaneously the pure focus and full rendering of the photograph. Fragmentation and car body finish.
What constitutes difference is the small negotiations between the hand and finish. The way individuals peaks through objects. Yet such interpretations lend an alternative to art simply by location an alternative there. By finding them and co-creating difference with the artist.

Advertising fives the promise of pleasure while only making good in the act of purchase. Arts promise is change and liberation from the given world. Both promises are illusions and both pleasures are fictional. Both are only partially sensorial, only optical.

It is no wonder that so many artists found (and find) it necessary to interrupt pleaure and beauty and withhold them from the viewer. Where advertising offers a world of pleasure already available, art recognizes the illusion and seeks to render the impossibility of pleasure under the current condition.