Quotes About Consumerism

When you go to an art gallery you are simply a tourist looking at the trophy cabinet of a few millionaires.

The art world is now a slave of mass culture. We have a sound-bite culture and so we have sound-bite art. You look at it, you get it - it's as immediate and as superficial as that.

What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest.

The beautiful people in the magazines, got the normal ones living beyond their means.

I never think that people die. They just go to department stores.

No shame, no solution, no remorse, no retribution, just people selling t-shirts.

Pop art is for everyone.

Pop art is a way of liking things.

Like many members of the uncultured, Cheez-It consuming public, I am not good at grasping modern art.

Andy Warhol defined Pop Art.

Instead of asking what's wrong with rampant consumerism, we ought to be asking, 'What justifies it?' Popular art does not have to pander to the lowest level of intelligence and taste.

Civilization is the art of creating useless needs.

What strip mining is to nature the art market has become to culture.

Advertising and art are getting all mixed up. I think some of the most exciting pieces of TV are the commercials.

Unfortunately much of it is frittered away on fast cars, designer clothes and an attitude to pleasure reminiscent of the 18-30 holiday packages.

But if the customer knows that five dollars is the actual price that cup of coffee should be—the correct price to ensure that everyone involved in bringing that cup of coffee into existence is being treated humanely and given a chance to live with dignity—would that customer balk or step up?

3. We believe that people spend their own money more prudently than they spend other people's money. So goods and services produced in the competitive marketplace are likely to be produced more efficiently and with more regard for real consumer demand than goods produced by government, and thus we should try to keep as many aspects of life as possible outside the control of government.

The assumption that you everyone else is like you. That you are the world. The disease of consumer capitalism. The complacent solipsism.

This is so American, man: either make something your god and cosmos and then worship it, or else kill it.

It is within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars - compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things. Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: the only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.

To be a mass tourist, for me,...is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.

But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

Her expression is from Page 18 of the Victoria's Secret catalogue.

We think of ourselves now as eaters of the pie instead of makes of the pie...Corporations make the pie. They make it and we eat it.