Consumer Society: The Era Of Aesthetics' Ending

In the metamorphic world, the estheticians use critic as the quomodo for guarding the meaning of human. But appearance of modern capitalism has greatly changed. In such situation, if esthetics insists to its form, it would lose its energy of critic. Modern esthetics must span its border as its objects and melt its essential into the analysis and critics to modern social phenomenons. Baudrillard caught theessential and internal mechanism of modern social------consumption. There are twocharacters of his definition to consumption: 1) consumption is occupancy to signs; 2) consumption is a motive and outstretched construction.The appearance of the modern symbolized consumption is aesthetic: the ideological meaning of objects in tradition has been replaced by liberated function. The glass and transparency make distance. Modern tools make human be spectator. Modern human use disfunctional system, which represented by antiques, to embody the occupancy of origin and the obduracy of certainty, and perish the sense of history by this way. The perfection of techniques is the desire of development without a certain aim.The theory of Baudrillard has criticized a series of aesthetic categories. In his opinion: freedom in modern society is a kind of inter-control relationship between human and objects, that is an illusion of freedom; personality is the outcome of thebatch production of consumer system; it is a kind of self-shoot, a shadowy self-comfort and satisfaction; the aesthetic distance formed the lonely state of modern human, this makes favor and identity be important motivity of consumption; nature here has been changed to naturety, it is a consumable symbol opposes to real nature; art and artworks gradually turns into sign; as the container and carrier of spirit, body has been changed to a separate object, a kind of capital that needs to be managed and operated; the inimitably expansion of image in mass media make human immerse in the aspiration of itself, which makes human fowardly go into the matrix of consumption.Abundant objects and information are accumulated in supermarkets and mass media, which give people an image of rich. At the same time, commodity appears in series to rise people's desire. The difference between kinds of commodity has gradually been erased, replacing the utility as object. That is the explicit controllable mechanism of consumption.As the deconstruction of Utopia, Baudrillard thought political economics cannot discover the real situation of modern consumer society. So he expand the political economics which just care for exchange value and use value to sign value area, while considering symbolic exchange to be the new Utopia idea. But he quickly went a more floating theory: the death of truth, value and history.