Baudrillard on Objects:
If I use a refrigerator to refrigerate it is a practical mediation: it is not an object but a refrigerator. And in that sense I do not possess it. A utensil is never possessed, because a utensil refers one to the world; what is possessed is always an object abstracted from its function and then brought into relationship with the subject. In this sense all owned objects partake of the same abstractness, and refer to one another only in so far as they refer soley to the subject.
A thing is objectified when abstracted from its function, its use, and viewed from the point of view of the subject. ‘Objects’ no longer pass beyond themselves to an equipmental context, they no longer implicate a ‘referential whole’; rather they point back to the ‘I’, his fantasies and desires. They are dream rebuses. Advertising appeals to things as ‘objects’ in this sense. And so, in another sense, does the collector, who says, for example, not ‘what a beautiful lamp’ or whatever, but ‘what a beautiful object’, and sees it in terms of its lustre, sumptuousness etc – all those things that refer us to the clutches of the owner, all that is most eminently graspable, caressable, ripe for festishisation. The paradox therefore is that the thing becomes an object when transformed into a receptacle of subjectivity, that the vanishing point of objectification - its target and precondition - is subjective custody .