Commodity Culture Quotes

Oil painting did to appearances what capital did to social relations. It reduced everything to the equality of objects. Everything became exchangeable because everything became a commodity.

Everything does not have to be a commodity.

The industrial mind is a mind without compunction; it simply accepts that people, ultimately, will be treated as things and that things, ultimately, will be treated as garbage. (A Defense of the Family Farm, 1986)

Travel, which was once either a necessity or an adventure, has become very largely a commodity, and from all sides we are persuaded into thinking that it is a social requirement, too.

Violence is a commodity in the U. S. and the culture of violence is toxic.

If mass communications blend together harmoniously, and often unnoticeably, art, politics, religion, and philosophy with commercials, they bring these realms of culture to their common denominator -- the commodity form. The music of the soul is also the music of salesmanship. Exchange value, not truth value, counts.

We are putting value in the things that really are not valuable, things like commodities or disposable stuff that can bought, but the rainforest has been undervalued, because the value shouldn't be in the trees that you take out; it's should be with leaving the trees to preserve the life system that sustains life on the planet.

Fashion designers only occasionally tread outside the realm of clothes as pure commodity. When they do, the results are often a muddled, self-conscious message.

The small amount of people that control the discourse around painting - I thought that the whole museum world was just a bunch of phonies, and I didn't really want to have anything to do with it. I guess I did installations, in a funny way, because they couldn't be commodified.

I'm also looking for the psychological elements that fuel commodity culture. For example, if we imbue girls with deep insecurity about their bodies through images of an impossible ideal, we create a really vulnerable and avid consumer. If somebody feels that they're not OK without a certain product, you have a very deep and loyal market that will come back to the product again and again. Sometimes, this process is both rational and irrational.

The spirit of a production-centered, commodity-greedy society is such that only the non-conformist can defend himself sufficiently against it. Those who are seriously concerned with love as the only rational answer to the problem of human existence must, then, arrive at the conclusion that important and radical changes in our social structure are necessary, if love is to become a social and not a highly individualistic, marginal phenomenon.

A novel is a commodity that fulfills a certain need; people need to buy daydreams like they need to buy ice cream or aspirin or gin. They even need to buy a pinch of intellectual catnip now and then to liven up their thoughts.

The reporting of news has to be understood as propaganda for commodities, and events by images.

Typography tended to alter language from a means of perception and exploration to a portable commodity.

It is necessary that I am viewed as a product. I am a product.