The Ontological Dilemma of the Artist’s Bottle: Between Consumption and Contemplation

I recently purchased a bottle of Dictador rum branded by Richard Orlinski, a Dom Perignon 2015 by Takashi Murakami, and I was gifted a Veuve Clicquot by Kusama, beautiful bottles: should I drink them or not?

But let's start from the beginning. If once the label was only an identifier, today maisons like Dom Pérignon, Veuve Clicquot, Absolut, Hennessy, Dictador, or Rémy Martin consider it a space for expression; sometimes, even, the most visible part of the product's identity. The involvement of artists like Murakami, Kusama, Obey, Warhol, or Pantone is not limited to decoration: it produces added value that merges aesthetics, storytelling, and programmed scarcity.

This process has made the bottle a dual object: a consumer good and a collectable work. A hybrid that the market has accepted with surprising naturalness, but how should we approach this product-artwork? It is in the ambivalent nature of these objects that the central question arises: should an artist's bottle be drunk or preserved?

The answer is not obvious, because what we are handling is not a trivial choice between taste and investment, but a tension between two ideas of value.

The Hybrid Nature: An Object in Suspension

An artist's bottle cannot be classified as neither pure artwork nor pure product. It lives in a liminal condition: it contains a liquid intended for consumption and, at the same time, an artistic casing conceived to last. It is an object that guards two opposing purposes (telos): the finiteness of the act of drinking and the desire for permanence inherent in the artwork.

For this reason, its existence is suspended between a before and an after. As long as it remains sealed, it is in what Aristotle would call "potency": anything can still happen. But this potency, like any form of waiting, has a price.

For the collector, opening a bottle means compromising its economic value. The artwork loses its material integrity and its status as a limited edition. Yet, from a philosophical perspective, the opposite occurs: it is precisely the act of consumption that fulfills its profound nature.

A bottle that will never be opened is like a book never read. Its function remains suspended, and what remains is a fetish. The form prevails over the content; the image takes the place of the original purpose. It is a victory of the surface — often fascinating — over the substance.

Thus, a paradox is born: when art meets the object of consumption, it risks transforming it into an idol, an object "made sacred" to the point where it can no longer be used. But is what cannot be used still a product? Art appropriates the product, but at what cost? Understandably, we are not in the case of ready-mades, where a common, low-cost object is elevated to a work of art. In this case, we are talking about products of excellence, intrinsically produced with great science and mastery.

The Aesthetics of Taste: The Kantian Contribution

Kant reminds us that the aesthetic experience is not exhausted in visual contemplation but requires an encounter between sensibility and form. If this is true, an artist's bottle is not complete as long as it remains sealed. Its aesthetic experience is dual: visual and gustatory. Preserving it forever means mutilating an essential part of its nature. It is a radical aestheticization which, although noble, dissolves the original meaning of the liquid, reduced to dormant matter, to a presence that is not realized. The preserved object is only half aesthetic. It is an amputated work.

If for Kant aesthetic experience requires the participation of sensibility, it is the phenomenology of the twentieth century that radicalizes this intuition: the artwork is no longer just perceived form, but lived event. A work of art is not just what it is, but what happens in the encounter between subject and object. A bottle invites the gesture; locking it in a display case means depriving it of the possibility of the event.

Drinking an artist's bottle produces a unique moment: it unites aesthetics, taste, conviviality, and memory. It is an ephemeral experience, but precisely for this reason, it is endowed with a form of authenticity that the sealed object can never have. A drunk bottle loses commercial value but acquires a phenomenological value: it is no longer an object in waiting but a fulfilled experience.

Incarnated Time: Lévinas and the Sundial of Experience

The thought of Emmanuel Lévinas offers a further perspective. For the philosopher, authentic time is not that marked by clocks, but the one that opens up in relation: the time of the other (read on time The Liberated Time. Ethics and Fragility). Drinking an artist's bottle means converging different temporalities: the time of the vineyard, that of fermentation and aging, the creative time of the artist, and finally the time of the drinker. All these layers gather in a single gesture, an "instant" charged with relation. It is an act that reawakens the object's retained time and frees it from its inertia.

The preserved bottle, on the contrary, represents a frozen time: an apparent eternity, almost a deception. The liquid continues to age, but it is an aging without purpose, a slow decay that does not lead to maturation, but rather to a progressive unusability.

Like the characters in Waiting for Godot, the sealed bottle lives in the infinite waiting for an event that will never arrive: it exists, but it does not happen. It is a sterile eternity.

A Dilemma That Reveals the Nature of Contemporary Art

To drink or not to drink? There is no universal answer. The choice depends on the idea we have of art, consumption, value, and time. Preserving means privileging form, rarity, permanence. Drinking it means accepting finiteness and giving value to the experience.

These objects, so ambiguous and sophisticated, force us to rethink the boundaries of the artwork: they remind us that art can be ephemeral, that value can reside as much in permanence as in fulfillment, and that some objects truly live only when they are consumed.

Perhaps the true meaning of an artist's bottle lies precisely in the dilemma it imposes. Not in the answer it provides, but in the question it forces us to formulate: what is a work of art today? And above all: where does its time reside?

To this crossroads, a further perspective can be added, rooted in the philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard. The Danish thinker distinguished between three modes of existence: the aesthetic, in which one lives for pleasure; the ethical, in which one lives according to duty; and the religious, in which one lives in the absolute. The artist's bottle seems to ask for a synthesis of all three: an aesthetic life, capable of enjoying art; ethical, capable of respecting the creator's intentionality; and almost religious, capable of grasping the sacredness of the present moment.

Not drinking the bottle is, in some way, betraying the cognac. Not appreciating the art is betraying the artist. The true aristocracy of the spirit lies in knowing how to inhabit both dimensions: to contemplate and to consume, to keep and to let go, accepting impermanence as a condition of beauty. Omar Khayyam reminds us of this in the Rubāʿiyāt: "Drink wine, for you do not know whence you came; be merry, for you do not know where you will go." What does it mean? You do not know the ultimate origin of your existence, you do not know your final destination; what you have is this moment. Khayyam uses wine as an allegory of existence lived in its fullness, without always postponing to the future or taking refuge in the past.

The artist's bottle, drunk at the right time, with the right people, in the right attitude, ceases to be an object and becomes incarnated experience. Perhaps this — more than any collection or material permanence — is the only form of immortality accessible to the finite beings we are.

So what should I do? Drink or not drink? In light of this analysis, I have no doubts: I open and drink. I drink because not doing so presents me with two enormous problems. The first is betraying the wine, the cognac, the mastery that went into producing them: it would be an absolute waste, and it would call into question my personal ethics. The aesthetics of the bottle are not ruined by drinking: only the economic value is ruined.

But who am I? What do I want? Do I really want to preserve value? Is this art? Is this the value of wine? Or am I — as I believe — an aesthete, a convivial person, a wealthy and generous one, towards myself and towards others? Am I perhaps immortal? No, I am not. I cannot wait indefinitely, and I certainly cannot resell an object so dense with meanings. The metaphor is that of life: most of what we do, we do as if we were immortal, postponing an embrace, delaying an event, projecting into an indefinite future what we could live now.

Today we can immortalize our moments: if memory is not enough, there are photos, videos, stories of dinners. Like when we buy our first house, a designer bag, a boat, or a sports car: we seek a memorable moment.

Drinking one of these bottles can become exactly that: a gesture performed among friends, making the moment sacred and celebrating art — the art of the wine and that of the artistic form. I drink because I certainly have an excess of goods but a scarcity of memories truly worth keeping. For all this: I drink.