Commodities play an important role in international transaction; they commonly do so with the recognition of their place in an economic context and with an unapologetic honesty concerning the importance of the placelessness expected of the product. However, when certain critical processes are forgotten as expertise, since they find easier brand and trade as products, they do so with their acknowledgement as currency. When critical processes such as architecture and the moulding of our environment place manufactured exclusivity ahead of context, they acknowledge competition with the gold standard of modern economics, that of popular culture and the exclusivity found in the worlds of Galliano, Gucci and Guess. It will be design legitimised by brand reputation, satisfactorily recognised as a product that it galvanises the favour of world opinion; an architecture sufficiently divorced from all contexts to look like it could belong in Dubai, or Frankfurt, or Beijing, or Lille. An architecture purchased as the art of the geographically acontextual. Expertise is subverted as critical process, being branded and acquired as product: architecture and environment are striven for as product and commodity.
Acquisition applies across scales of reference; architecture constitutes a mere fraction of its domain. In its disregard for the difference between product and critical process, acquisition has been globally preened with products and services of supposed repute, legitimising entry and participation into the world of commodities, with the aim of casting its participants as the owners of technology and art, of culture and as purveyors of the exclusive. The practice of acquisition is most powerful in the corporate governments and entities of developed nations, with most Third World leadership aspiring so.
The world has indulged in acquisition with a confidence borne of ignorance and with the false sense of achievement that comes from the misconstrued belief that expertise can be commoditised, only to the result of global ubiquity. The ubiquity of human effort fills our lives with the sameness of the highest built, the longest flown, the smallest designed or the largest made. However, ubiquity seeps into our lives in subtler ways; governments and banks, free markets and wars, the truth of a diminishing middle class and an increasing divide between the rich and poor in every part of the world - these all feed and are themselves fed on the ubiquity we live in.
Diverse as they might all appear, they all share the single fact of their being byproducts of acquisition. With commodity as its currency, acquisition has become the high art of the acontextual.