Thematic Collection: Consumption

 An overarching theme we have come across in our discussions this interim is consumption.  Consumption of music, consumption of image, consumption of the performance, consumption of the performer, and, most disturbingly, consumption of the person. We looked at consumption in it's broadest sense.  We not only consume the artist and his or her art, we consume everything they were trying to sell to us. I define it as the "taking in" of something. We consume by listening to the radio, watching television, surfing the internet, etc.
  One aspect of this theme is mindless consumption, where we consume without realizing what we are consuming.  I always think of the person who just says, "I just like the music and the beat--its catchy," when they don't think of the ideology the artist, their image, or the lyrics are representing. We consume with our eyes, we consume with what we read,  and, by buying something from the artist, we support their ideology they are selling financially thus empowering it.
  Another aspect of consumption is the sense of ownership we get through consuming.  We feel that things we consume are our possessions.  This can harmfully translate into us thinking we possess and own an artist, a person.  We gain control through this consumption and it can have devastating effects like the ones we saw with Britney Spears. In order for us to want to consume an artists, they have to play by our rules and form to something that we will consume.  Also, because we have this idea of ownership, we think we are entitled to knowledge of everything that we have consumed.  We want to know the artist's sexuality, what the lyrics mean, why they wrote the song, why the sang it, who they are in a relationship with, what their family is like...pretty much we want to know everything without concern for the person's privacy--and we think we are entitled to it.
In our consumer culture, everything we see is put there for consumption, it is a type of performance put on for the purpose of getting people to consume it.  This is what I was thinking about when I chose the following images, links, and videos. The performance may or may not be true to what it is actually representing, but it is there to sell the consumer an idea that they will store in their mind.

This illustrates the idea of consuming through television:

In celebrities or tv starts, we are presented with something that we are supposed to aspire to be. In the TV show Happy Days, Fonzie sold a type of "cool" and taught people how to achieve it.  They consumed it through viewing the show.  

Think about what we are consuming just by looking at these Rolling Stone covers.

I typed in "women advertisements" and "men advertisements" and these were each the second images that came up.  Compare the differences in what we are consuming in what men should be and what women should be. 

Here is another image of consumerism as it relates to the music industry:  Band Tshirts.