Market Value, Aestheticization and the Commodity Frontier

In our increasingly commercial societies, we are confronted not only with a cornucopia of commodities and commercialized services, but also with a variety of discourses and institutions identifying us as consumers, people who engage with objects on display for sale on a variety of markets. We fantasize about these objects, look at them, purchase them, and eventually use them well beyond the marketplaces where they were originally acquired. The cultures that consumers construct with objects they purchase on the market and deploy in daily activities are central to late modern life across the globe. This is coupled with what falls under the sociological label of the aestheticization of everyday life, which has itself become a shortcut for contemporary culture, especially as it unfolds through increasingly iconic and narratively elaborated consumer culture. While classic aesthetic discourse places aesthetics as the appreciation of beauty outside of ordinary experiences, consumer culture has flourished based on the aestheticization of everyday life, of ordinary objects and daily experiences. On the production side, we only have to think of the huge commercial success of businesses like Ikea or Habitat, which offer furnishings and household goods created by innovative designers at prices accessible to large strata of the population. On the consumption side, we may consider how the transformation of the music industry and the means of listening, as well as the transformation of the publishing industry and the means of reading—notably with the increasing role of the Internet and digital technologies—has promoted ways of consuming which revolve around the involvement of consumers in aesthetic discourses about the perceived quality of music and texts. Consumers are not only invited to write reviews, they are also creative on a practical level, engaging directly with cultural/artistic production: they act as fans in fanzines and blogs that prolong the story of a novel; upload new versions of songs with their own voices or instruments; and so on. Ultimately, we may consider how production and consumption are becoming increasingly articulated through markets, commercialization, fairs, and festivals, and refer quite poignantly to the way art festivals—centered around literature, music, film, visual arts, etc.—are becoming relevant as a meeting point and melting pot for both producers and consumers, creators and publics. These institutions and occasions have something quite important in common: they rest on eventization or experience rationality, placing value on the uniqueness of the experience of the specific occasion and on its configuration as a creative space capable of generating value.