‘Images’ are ‘free-floating’ - needless to say, fundamentally different from the finite expensive object. Even though there’s been a rearguard action in the art-market to push the financial worth, the cost of art objects, through the ceiling (Hirst’s ‘appropriated’ jewel covered skull being the most high profile contemporary example), instinctively there just seems something plodding or inadequate to this display of wealth-power, tiresomely heavy-handed and unimpressive.
Its not just the obvious second-hand ‘playing the markets’ strategy; the still relatively new fluidity of images through electronic networks, their speed of movement and disposability, makes the exchange value of objects just curiously old-fashioned to the point of being completely pointless.
Or is it that simple?
Any flow of energy can be dammed, redirected, downright manipulated, whilst being made to appear organic, chaotically unmediated, a purity to merely experience.
So let’s start considering the commodity-fetish (after all Santa is on the way) as peculiar way stations, gnomic fingerprints exposing social mores and cultural perspectives.
Worryingly, maybe we can’t even see ourselves, can’t step back from being enveloped in a skin of motivating desires and concerns, without the object, the wilfully crafted stuffs of the world, as a distancing device and an inroad into a communal psyche.
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