Kevin Salazar – Consumerist Culture

Preface: My name is Kevin Salazar and this portfolio project is called “Consumerist Culture”, The licensing I will be using is Attribution CC BY. [CC BY 4.0].

This portfolio is about the consumerist culture we live every day, I used a couple artist to portray this culture using their art as a way of communication and showing what we do to our planet due to not being careful with our home, I used the pictures of artists like Chris Jordan and Raymond Fruseth Gangstad which use their talent to show the world how bad consumerist culture is and how serious this theme is. Another phenomenon of post-modernity is the use of art as a way of express ourselves and draw attention to problems we live nowadays, the production of consumables is contingent to the economic urgency of creating new genres every day, which are more innovative to promote the consumerism, in this way, new products are available in any shop or supermarket which purpose is to be consumed immediately in order to be quickly forgotten, disposed and replaced by newer products creating this a loop of consumerist culture polluting our planet and not taking in consideration the side effects this culture might cause.

The two themes my portfolio will be discussing are manmade products in nature, as well as damage to our planet earth. The first theme of manmade products which I can analyze from the pictures and reading the artist’s definition is that we live in a world where everything we create is disposable and we do not mind how bad it is to our planet and the consequences it may cause, the second theme I could think about was damage to our planet earth and how badly we affect our home because of our consumerist culture and the necessity of consuming a product and quickly dispose it and replace it by a newer product.

These pictures show the big impact us humans affect with our consumption and how careless we are about our environment. Picture number one is called “The desert of consumerist culture” which shows an empty shopping cart left alone in the desert, we can conclude that pollution is also present in our deserts, the second picture we can see pieces of plastic which the author said it was collected from the pacific ocean, here we can see the amount of pollution we send to the oceans and how dangerous it is to ocean creatures. We can see picture number three where we can see a dead bird with some garbage in the middle, showing that this specie could have died because it consumed what we disposed without the proper handling for this not to happen thinking this is part of their food.

I chose this two artist because their way of showing what we cause with their art, using what we can find everywhere and portrait how badly we treat our home, I believe that using this art as a way of communication to our next generation so they do not make the same mistakes we are doing. The artists provide an unconventional way to understand the consumerist culture because they use very explicit pictures to show their art. This represents the way we live in our world and how serious this theme is and that we have to take action before it is too late.