You want it, you buy it, you forget it

"Consumption is only one part of our relationship to the world. In most societies, who we are is bound up in the kind of goods we share in common," he says.

For example, a family can be defined as a group of people who share certain possessions - such as particular foods. The pitfall is allowing an outside force - a marketing message - to define the meaning of those possessions and hence what it means to be a family, he says.

Max Hollein, cocurator of the exhibit, describes the shopping landscape as the archaeology of the present. Reaching back through a hundred years of consumerism to Paris storefronts in 1910, the exhibit shows how the launch of department stores changed the shopping experience. Designers of the first such stores took inspiration from the World Expos as they sought to build a themed environment.

The 1960s and Pop Art are represented through works from Claes Oldenburg's "Store." In 1961, the New York artist sold food, clothes, and other everyday items made of painted plaster from his workshop. Oldenburg was working in harmony with consumer culture just as the artists of centuries gone by collaborated with the church or the ruling family.

Consumption in the Bauhaus movement is represented in photographers' serial arrangement of objects. Surrealism shows up through the exploration of the body as a form of commodity. Several photos by Man Ray depict mannequins sparsely adorned with fabrics, feathers, and odds and ends. Another, by Denise Bellon, shows Salvador Dalí carrying a mannequin in the same way a man would carry a briefcase.

The exhibit was well received by the German public. On Frankfurt's main shopping street, a 7,546-square-foot poster of two eyes hung down the front of a department store. It bore the words (in German): "You Want It, You Buy It, You Forget It," allowing visitors to ponder why they shop just as they are consummating the act.

Shopping remains primarily a female activity, sociologists say. Since most women shop for someone besides themselves, shopping becomes a way to show love and attention. In some patriarchal cultures, shopping is the only morally sanctioned reason for a woman to leave her house and interact with others. In this way, shopping can be an act of liberation.

Some consumers shop as a way to leave their mark on the world - to exercise "personal agency," as Dr. Cook calls it. Others want to do their part to help the economy.

"We're not going to stop the planes going over Afghanistan or alter things," Cook says, "but we can buy a piece and put it on our mantle and change our world."

• The exhibit has ended its stay in Frankfurt and opens at the Tate Modern in Liverpool, England, on Dec. 20. For more information, go to: www.tate.org.uk/liverpool/exhibitions/shopping.

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