Friday, July 16, 2010

the cool and the authentic as conspicuous consumption

Cool as an ethic is exquisitely suited to a life of consumption rather than production because the competitive spirit that we see hiding beneath the detached surface presented by Cool can drive new, adventurous and more discriminating modes of consumption, while simultaneously offering a handle by which Cool advertisers can steer the consumer in the desired direction. To characterize the way this new Cool consumer individualism operates, perhaps we could be forgiven for coining a new phrase: the 'competitive consumption of experience'. Everyone is a rebel now, no-one is ordinary, no-one wants to be a face in the crowd, everyone wants intense experiences: indeed everyone wants more intense experiences than their friends and neighbours. People have a mental checklist of intense experiences that need to be collected: climb the mountain; watch a volcano erupt; swim with the dolphins; have multiple orgasms.

The media understand this greed for the superlative, and their hyperbolic coverage of each newly fashionable leisure activity veers toward the condition of pornography, giving us food-porn, travel-porn, garden-porn, car-porn, and decor-porn.



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