Just tossing around the idea that what if jewelry arose from domestication?  Considering the way we brand animals to mark them as ours.  The way farmers put necklaces on goats, the sturdier necklaces to indicate the more undomesticated they are (IE the more likely to be head butted by), maybe even to the point of a criminals leg braces and ankle bracelets -indicating the more we want to keep them under our surveillance... It seems the more we hang things on beasts or people, the more indicative it is of the more we are possessive of their whereabouts and hence the more valued they are.
     Not to say that this is so.  Yet if it was?    What if we have overtime embraced that symbolism and have actually acquired over the ages an aesthetic based there on?  Now what would that mean if our visual aesthetic is based upon ease of recognition of prior domestication?  Of a perceived value placed on a given aesthetic determined by a need to know how much another values the whereabouts of something,  Of warning signs this particular one is valued by another. The more highly valued, the more extravagant the markings?   How would that have informed our artistic aesthetics and consequent theories of art.   Only to wonder what if our aesthetics sensibilities are based upon that which allowed ease of recognition of   domestication and possession?

Could that idea be extrapolated to our license plates and our societies current embrace of Q-codes and RIF chips?  What type of aesthetics would arise of those markings?  "Brandings" of not of property, but of  placement of movement within an industrial/commercial process?  An aesthetics of integration , of visual coding for the initiated, of radio-wave based communications, of recognition based upon approachability to a RFID reader ? 

Just wondering what if?

© GAMcCullough      2013