Critique of Aesthetic Capitalism

When a new smartphone comes on the market, queues start forming in the early hours outside the palatial stores. This shows that what matters today is not only the use value of a commodity (that one can make phone calls or surf the Internet with such a device), but also what Gernot Böhme calls its “staging value”. The stage-setting of products and lifestyles is a central feature of aesthetic capitalism, the manifestations of which Böhme tracks down here. In concerning himself with the ideology of growth, with the soundscape in shopping malls and the connection between performance ideology and consumption, he makes an important contribution to a reconstruction and extension of the theory of the culture industry to the sphere of economic life.