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At a time when art is often upstaged by a fascination with the market forces which drive it, Art & Australia takes pause to ponder artistic practices that address our consuming compulsions. From Damien Hirst's For the love of God, 2007, to the critical mass of Andreas Gursky's billboard-size photographs, such work plays on the competing desire for, and rejection of, material accumulation. Artists are also employing the tropes of the trades they seek to interrogate. Be it the fashion advertising-blankness of Petrina Hicks's modern portraiture or the logo branding of Darren Sylvester's recent photography, the nexus between art and advertising can playfully blur, smudge and shine.

Two artists and two curators from across Australasia were invited to think about and discuss intersections and couplings across contemporary art, commodification and commerce in a roundtable discussion: Melbourne-based Matthew Griffin; Auckland-based Reuben Paterson; Alex Baker, Senior Curator, Contemporary Art, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; and Rachel Kent, Senior Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney...

Alex Baker: My take on the ever-quickening collapse between high and low culture is that the distinctions have always been false. Nothing is sacred under ever-expanding markets within capitalism. It is inevitable that artists will find new markets and new expressive avenues within those markets to do what they do. As much as Murakami works within the elite market of high-end consumer culture (for example Louis Vuitton), he also licenses his imagery on T-shirts that are available to a much broader and much 'poorer' audience than the Vuitton market...What is interesting to me is when corporations appropriate the aesthetics and techniques of subcultures in order to promote their products. I recall a Sony Playstation ad campaign a year or two ago in which wheat paste stencil graffiti - very raw looking - was adhered to urban surfaces throughout Philadelphia advertising the new video game. It looked just like street art. In fact, I think they hired street artists to conduct the campaign, but in the end it was to prompt the consumption of a mega corporation's product.

... We are constantly searching for authenticity, but given the voraciousness of consumption, authenticity is swallowed whole, digested, and watered down and then sold back in easily packaged forms. So what we have are a few 'authentic', say, beatniks, hippies, and punk rockers existing untouched by the dominant culture for about the blink of an eye, and then a devouring of this new form of expression by capitalist forces (record companies, fashion, you name it). But just because even subversive expression is commodified so rapidly, that does not mean that those who are participating in consumptive behaviour are less authentic. People are not mindless drones simply consuming. We are human beings with agency and can consume what the dominant culture markets towards us and digest it in our own highly subjective, idiosyncratic ways. There is room for noise in the system...

This article appears in excerpted form. You can read the entire article in Art & Australia's Summer 2008 issue.