The Essay

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Camelia Elias Wed. 12.15-14.00 Room 3.117
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shopping

• 1 a to examine goods or services with intent
  to buy
• b to hunt through a market in search of the
  best buy
• 2 to make a search hunt(Meriam-Webster
  dictionary)

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Edward Tauber (Why do People Shop, 1972)

• Why do people shop?
• Why do people shop in more than one store?
• Why do people shop where they do?
• logic / motives / location / patronage

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personal motives for shopping

• role playing
• diversion
• learning about new trends
• self-gratification
• physical activity
• sensory simulation

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social motives for shopping

• social experiences outside the home communication
  with others having the same interest
• peer group attraction
• status and authority
• pleasure of bargaining

6
shopping and agency

• who controls whom, and what?
• has the activity of shopping taken over our so
  called free will and power of discernment and
  logic?
• what kind of identification processes does
  shopping entail?
• what is the goal of shopping?

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shopping as aesthetics of everyday life

• defines spiritual territories
• shapes our lives through space and time
• ritualizes our major decisions
• separates us from others
• puts us in the presence of others
• divides our activities between tedious chores and
  moral preoccupations
• consumes out lives

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shopping as a cultural activity

• satisfies our need to socialize
• constitutes a means for creative expression
  establishes paradoxes
• its our most creative, but also our most
  controlled behaviour
• constitutes our means for pursuing value
• makes us feel that we belong (the ur-experience
  of shopping)
• social worth (based on receiving recognition from
  others)
• economic worth
• cultural worth
• psychological worth (I shop, therefore I am)

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I shop, therefore I am

• shopping in art represents interaction and
  reconciliation of visual art, aesthetics, and the
  consumer cultures subtle techniques of seduction
  
• reversals of the Cartesian dictum

• (Barbara Kruger
• "I shop, therefore I am, Schirn Kunsthalle
  Frankfurt)

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shopping as a learning process

• forces us to account for our place in society and
  imagine what it might be like to rise above it
  (Zukin, 29)
• teaches us to learn and decode codes of styles
  and values
• constitutes a narrative of responsibility
• places focus on the self
• constitutes a public realm in which we struggle
  to create an objective ideal of value
• teaches us about what we desire, and how to know
  what is right
• constitutes a research process
• constitutes cultural capital

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sizing up people and oneself Sidse Babett Knudsen