People consider this century to be the highest peak of human civilization. We consider ourselves to be the most intelligent, and the most intellectual, of all the human civilizations that ever roamed this earth. While we still need books and guides to make us understand what Marx or Aristotle were saying, when in those times children could understand easily what they said without needing a holding hand, we still consider ourselves to be far superior to them. In the same way, we consider ourselves to be better at making things; we can make blogs, we can make cell phones, and we have cars. We are definitely better than those people and more intelligent, right?
No longer do we focus on making sculptures or paintings to express our emotions; we buy merchandize to display our character, and we support the idea of having expiring consumer goods that need to be recycled or replaced constantly, to reflect our changing nature. We change more characters in our lifetime than a snake sheds its skin in its lifetime. We don’t need art to express ourselves; we need new shoes to express ourselves. We don’t need a new painting in our house to express what we want to express; we wear words on our caps to express what we want.
Not everyone is as “blessed” as the rest of humanity; some people do aim for artistic endeavors, that take the elements of today and blend it into something that they consider art, for reasons that most of the people do not understand. While people cannot create art that is completely unique, some people do aim for things such as The Camera Van. 
The idea of the people who try to create such a thing today is not to make money; individuals who spent countless number of hours using technology in a non-technical way to create something that may be considered beautiful by many, and still ugly by many more, do it because they can, and because they wish to. Consider a human being, if we don’t get overrun by something else by then, in the future, like a few thousand years from now. If that human being uncovers artifacts from today, what will she/he learn from those artifacts? Will that individual find our cell phones and think we considered cell phones to be religious objects? Or will they find our keyboards and think that we were obsessed with typing? What will they find to show them that we had human emotions, that many of us did value art, and that we were intelligent and did think about expressing ourselves. If our only mark in history would be in the form of blogs, then I am sure we have failed ourselves. We came to this earth, whether through religion or a big bang or through aliens or simply as mistakes of nature, to do something and leave a trademark which will help our future civilizations and our fellow living things [humans and every other living creature on the planet]. We have all focused on the first part, of doing something; we have forgotten the latter. Art was always there to express something and leave something; that would be expressing our then-current thoughts and then-current values and leaving behind a message for people in our own time and people who will come after us.
We can bring such art [not the exact above], to our homes and our daily life appliances. Appliances, part of the consumer goods, make the consumer culture very important. 
It is very refreshing for the human mind, specially these days, to be attached to consumer goods and at the same time taste the freedom of art. This is brought through taste and art that was experienced by the previous generations, who focused more on the artistic expression than economic expansion. The Matthews Fan Company takes art and combines it into everyday fans. Imagine the simplicity of such art; it is so basic and simple, that people in the previous generations would have laughed if we displayed such art as an achievement. Yet today, in a world where our expression of art relies on the designs of our blogs and the back plates of our cell phones, such art seems to interesting, we actually think it’s something creative. While these fans may not look as beautiful and creative as the works of Bernini, these somehow still show that, even if the art is being used to push more consumer goods into our lives, art is still there, though in a different form than what our ancestors from all around the world had envisioned. Even though art may have diminished to its most primitive art form in our age, the concept is still around, and that’s a beautiful thing.
While I doubt that such art will ever be valued more than the original works of art from centuries before, such a talent does show that we, as humans, cannot simply love technology as it is, which is overall dull and comes as a blessing only in when it functions at certain times, more than the beauty of the mind and life itself, and still need the creative and artistic side that comes with all human feelings. When we all started creating our own web sites, all we had was long pages with content on it that was separated only in the form of separate paragraphs. We loved it at that time; however, our own nature slowly compared it to things in real life, and found it to be dull. Thus, we started making layouts, and simplifying the pages to reflect more beautiful web sites. Whether it’s actually creating a piece of art for others to see and enjoy, or to make money off it, the important part is that art and creativity, no matter what stage it is in, is still surviving, even if it’s being applied to something that has never been tried before, or something that was originally intended to serve nothing to the concept of art, but now it actually is. Fans alone cannot be the symbol of this surviving stage; people like Kurt Wenner have indeed created a few techniques which were never tried before, and they are in fact very beautiful. If we cannot come up with original art or express life in artistic terms, we can combine technology and consumer goods into artistic forms that, even though they are primitive compared to previous generation arts, still keep the value of art within our hearts and make us realize that we have more important feelings for things other than the default form that comes with our own consumer culture creations.
When we all realize that, let’s focus on creating something that everyone has access to, and something that’s actually beautiful and expresses something.
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