I remember the first time I decided to have a cellphone. There were lots of different models and all of them were beautiful. After couple of years I lost this feeling about my own cellphone; It was not beautiful anymore. There are many advantages in throw away of things as many of them are discussed in Banham’s article. I want to argue that aesthetic and our definition of being beautiful is subject to constant change over time. That’s why we are happy to throw away our used objects. Even the scene of destruction is becoming a beautiful scene these days. humans tend to erase all the foot prints of their passed Zeitgeist in favor of the new one they admire. All these senses of happiness and pleasure of discarding things can be analyzed like a psychological factor. As seen in Toffler text, we prefer not to have something but to do something or be someone. I want to explain this will as our present-self’s respect for our future-self. Before the modern age, a generation could not see enough changes in lifestyle to understand the power of that changes and feel that human being is facing a transitory beauty rather than an eternal one. The pace of events hardly made a generation shocked about the influences of technology developments. In contrary, the modern human understands that there is no eternal rule for an object to be beautiful or even useful. I don’t want to underestimate the technical developments and economical aspects of our will to throw away but in my opinion those psychological aspects have a very great impact on our consumption habits. We understand that owning an object means that we will have feeling to that thing later and a time will come that our future-self stop using that object and therefore avoid having it anymore. The emotions one may have to an object may cause a sense of loss or missing it that can bother us. That’s why we prefer to rent things to prevent all the cycle with a painful end. In this case many of our behaviors according to objects are in the way that we can get rid of them easily.
I mentioned how Zeitgeist affect The shortening of lifespan of objects, spaces, buildings and etc. on the other hand this cycle of build and destruction make time marked by objects. If considering the paintings of medieval ages as reflectors of the habits and lifestyle of kings and knits living in that era, (which is a very discussing consideration) In my point of view one can hardly say that a painting, which he or she is meeting for the first time, belongs to 14th or 15th century. The objects used in centuries remained constant. In some cases, for example some special objects like swords or crowns may refer to the same object which was used during centuries. Compare this effect with modern photos of 60s and 70s. one can immediately understand the differences between two decades. even the context of two images are not the same. Referring to Banham piece one is clearly an aristocratic scene elaborately painted regarding the style which represented the eternal beauty while the other one can be interpreted as a sample of pop art.