Week 10: The Art of Sarah: Materialism and Consumer Culture in Korea
A counterfeit-luxury scam thriller, and why status goods carry so much weight in the story it tells
26 April 2027
The Art of Sarah (레이디 두아) follows a woman who turns a debt crisis into a counterfeit luxury-goods scheme, selling a fictional brand built to pass as real to Korea’s upper class and entertainment industry. The scam only works because the desire for the genuine article is so strong that almost no one stops to check — which is the show’s real subject: not luxury goods themselves, but what wanting them visibly is doing for the people who want them.
Questions#
- Why do wealth and status show up as such visible, legible cultural themes in Korean television specifically?
- How does the drama use real brand names and real prices to ground its fictional scam in something the audience already recognises?
- What does it mean that almost nobody in the story checks whether the goods are genuine?
- Is this a story about Korea, or a story about status economies more generally that happens to be set in Korea?
What to take from this week#
- materialism as a social performance, not just a personal trait
- status and how it’s signalled through visible consumption
- wealth as distinct from the appearance of wealth, which is the show’s actual subject
- consumption and its role in both social belonging and social sorting
- class, and who the scam’s marks are versus who its victims end up being
- social comparison as the engine the scam runs on
Approaching this week#
Do not reduce Korean society to “materialistic” — that’s a lazy read of a show that is, if anything, satirising exactly that reduction. Ask instead why wealth and status become such visible, dramatizable cultural themes here, and what that visibility does and doesn’t tell us about the society producing it.
Teaching team
- May Rhee — convenor