Commodity and Culture: The Object in Question‪.‬

MARK KINGWELL is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto whose writings include the books A Civil Tongue (1995), Dreams of Millennium (1996), and Better Living (1998). Philosophers from Aristotle to Kant to G.E. Moore have celebrated the perception of art as one of the fullest expressions of our humanity, an exploration of personality and psyche, and even a link to a collective soul or memory. Most thinkers who celebrate the aesthetic experience in this way appear to think that genuine aesthetic enjoyment is both straightforwardly accessible and untainted. But we must ask: in this day of mass consumption, can it be either for us anymore?