Consumerism
Art about buying and owning: shops, shelves, products and the idea that goods define who we are.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
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About
Consumerism describes a culture in which buying goods shapes status and identity. Artists have mirrored and satirised it. Seventeenth-century Dutch pronk still lifes by painters such as Willem Kalf already dwell on imported porcelain, silver and exotic fruit as markers of wealth, and from 1905 J. C. Leyendecker's Arrow Collar Man made a shirt-collar brand into a glossy ideal of masculinity.
Post-war abundance turned shopping into a theme. Claes Oldenburg filled a Manhattan storefront with plaster cakes, shirts and sandwiches for The Store (1961), Jeff Koons sealed new vacuum cleaners in lit acrylic cases in The New (1980), and Haim Steinbach set store-bought objects on laminated shelves. Barbara Kruger's Untitled (I shop therefore I am) (1987) put the argument in a single line. Andreas Gursky's photograph 99 Cent (1999) stretches a discount supermarket into an endless field of packaging, and Josephine Meckseper's vitrines borrow the look of shop windows.
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