"By depositing on the shoulders of novelty the main burden of modernity – to leave a dark past behind and move into an illuminated future – commodities were assured a place in the fetishistic pantheon. Commodities were “dream images” or “wish images”: more than objects, they represented utopian desires. Buying goods quenched the thirst for temporal transcendence, replacing a heavy, stifled era with a lightweight, mobile one in which the world was felt to be more at hand due to the myriad items now available in a rapidly expanding market."
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– Celeste Olalquiaga, Artificial Kingdom
