Cultural Resources
Consumerism
Articles, Essays, Op-eds
Freedom for Sale, Fintan O’Toole.
“In the 1950s and 1960s, a new generation of American artists began to think of advertising and commercial imagery as the new avant-garde.” These apolitical movements promoted consumerism and celebrated a mythical freedom. “That cultural nexus had managed to assert that the artist was free, that having a point of view within an artwork was a bad thing, that everything in the work of art had equal value, and that biographical experience was irrelevant. To say that none of those supposed truths could apply to most Black artists would be an understatement... [That vacuum] was filled, not just with understanding but with marketing, mythologies, and moneymaking. The Free World is, deliciously, a great rebuke to the cold war ideology of rugged individualism. Its artists and thinkers are always embroiled in the means of production, distribution, and exchange... But for all his mastery of fine detail, his eyes are always scanning the horizon for power — who has it and how it is being used. And yet his book is never merely cynical. Like a great novelist, he creates a world. Even as he deletes so ruthlessly the self-serving adjective ‘free,’ he fills the noun of his title with tumult and energy, with chaos and creation.”
#Vanlife, the Bohemian Social-Media Movement, Rachel Monroe.
“What began as an attempt at a simpler life quickly became a life-style brand. .. Scroll through the images tagged #vanlife on Instagram and you’ll see plenty of photos that don’t have much to do with vehicles: starry skies, campfires, women in leggings doing yoga by the ocean. Like the best marketing terms, “vanlife” is both highly specific and expansive. It’s a one-word life-style signifier that has come to evoke a number of contemporary trends: a renewed interest in the American road trip, a culture of hippie-inflected outdoorsiness, and a life free from the tyranny of a nine-to-five office job. Vanlife is an aesthetic and a mentality and, people kept telling me, a “movement.”..." (read more)
Consumerism and Human Agency, Hector Garcia.
One of the barriers to greater American civic engagement lies in the trend after WWII to convert all Americans more into consumers than engaged members of modern democracy. The other and larger barrier lies in the effort to make human agency in social, political, and economic affairs less and less relevant.