Art and Fine Wine: A Case Study in the Aestheticization of Consumption

This paper examines the reasons for the increasing association between art and fine wine in recent times. It argues that this convergence is part of a wider phenomenon where art has increasingly been employed to market ‘lifestyle’ commodities such as fashion and haute cuisine, and explains this with reference to the increased importance placed on aesthetics in the process of consumption in postmodern culture. In this context, art serves as an apt vehicle for promoting the idea of consumption as style insofar as it symbolizes a mode of life which transcends crass materialism. At the same time as it is used for commercial purposes, art is only able to perform this function by disavowing its own commodity status.