Birth of the Big, Beautiful, Reading Response.

     Dave Hickey's essay, Birth of the Big, Beautiful, Art Market, discusses how American Car culture in the postwar period functioned for him as a way to develop a sense of identity and a personal aesthetic in relation to the art world and art works. Hickey talks about how institutions, like the car companies and museums, use variations in their products to create objects of desire and stratify their consumers so they are constantly seeking a level of status, instead of the object for its function. I thought that the comparison of car culture and the relation a mechanic has to his car to the art market and artist was an interesting idea. I am not sure that I agree with Dave Hickey when he talks about how his personal experience with car culture helped him get an aesthetic, and he therefore has an equal ground to critique art. I find that his comparison between car culture and the art world has many things in common, like transferring an object to an a space where it is no longer about its functional use, but instead about an object of desire, and how institutions section off of objets, like cars or art works into classes, so those objects can display someones social status, by owning a Pollock or a Cadillac versus owning a Geo and a painting by an outsider artist. It seems that what Hickey points out about the similarities of the two institutions are the effects that capitalism and consumerism have on individuals and objects.