AustLit

'A key premise in classic aesthetic theory is the distinction between events, artworks, and phenomena, as determined by the presence or absence of an aesthetic response in a viewing subject.1 Classical aesthetic categories like the beautiful or the sublime are bound up with the distinction between high and low art, which has plagued critical theory across disciplines for decades. However, the high/low dichotomy was irreparably destabilised by postwar Western visual art movements, such as Dada and Pop Art, which coincided with a rapidly growing consumer culture that turned art into commodity, and vice versa. With the Western world moving into late-stage capitalism, there appears to be a new evolution in the destabilisation of the aesthetic distinctions between subject and object, the consumer and the consumed. Melinda Bufton’s poem “Conversations with Christopher Langton’s I luv you sculpture, 1993,” presents the possibility of a new aesthetic relation, the end of the line for capitalist objectification: a consumable subject.' (Introduction)