Back in the ’90s as a full-time astrologer, I worked weekends at the markets. But folk like psychic trappings, so I added tarot. And I tuned in to body language. Like transiting planets or cards, it can speak to unconscious themes. We don’t need arcane techniques to read others.

In the small block of flats where I live, my partner looks after the bins, which residents approve. At times, they too wheel them out or in. But even when they do, my partner still needs to remove recyclables from their rubbish, plastic from their compost and putrid food from recycling, then squash empty boxes that jam bins or the vicinity. Some boxes still bear their names. Or logos betray them. Grist for an intuitive reading, no birth chart needed.

In our compartmentalised consumerist society, most humans produce undue waste. Yet few dare explore its potential for reuse or reinvention. Our culture stresses first impressions, the carefully curated self. And this obsession with what we project leaves us empty, ungrounded, disembodied – so empty, we can be tricked into consuming our way to obesity, poverty, illness and/or addiction; so ungrounded, we walk around clutching phones like prosthetic brains that multitask as cameras, torches, reference libraries, support networks, shopping malls, life coaches, oracles etc.; so disembodied, we don’t ask where our food or ‘medicines’ come from.

Nor where they end up. Last month, my local beaches were closed for days after thousands of small black gunk balls washed ashore. Oil spill at sea? Weeks later, tests have identified a mix of cooking oil, soap scum, drugs, pesticides, human shit and more. But hey, nothing to do with us, it’s from sewage plus industrial runoff. Wonder how we coped before the advent of shampoo and deodorant, full of chemicals that would disrupt transmission of volatile pheromones (if science could prove whether or not we have any). If we didn’t smell fake, would our bullshit detectors work better? But pheromones, if they exist, don’t translate to cyberspace. Is that one reason why folk seem more willing than ever to lap up lies?

And those of us for whom consuming isn’t all we do, and who aren’t wedded to smartphones, still can’t escape the thrall of a system that scorns or scapegoats us if we don’t play ball, and rewards that which is or strives to get bigger, faster, louder and prouder – not smaller, slower, quieter and humbler. So we don’t have time or space to deal with waste, decay or death. Instead, all the poisons and pollutants, dense and subtle, that we use are coming back to bite us on our bums. The myth of progress is palling. So-called philanthropists get branded mass murderers. Social media moguls rig elections. Captains of industry turn our planet into a climatic Titanic – yet still we cling to their platforms and buy (or ‘subscribe to’) their wares.

Such are the wages of overconsumption. Our failure to deal responsibly with what we don’t want – disposable packaging, microbes, bad feelings, mortality – is draining the value and meaning from what we love. Nature, such as it is (commodified), suffers daily extinctions; truth is now a catchphrase propaganda has worn thin; beauty has left the public art building, to visit but seldom, banished to the fringes since postmodernism moved in.

Not sayin’ postcolonialism wasn’t overdue, though its truths have much work to do to provoke more than token change for the colonised. But if beauty and equality are mutually exclusive, we need to rethink our definitions. The Marxist-inflected left that browbeat me, for one, at art school has thrown the baby out with the bathwater. Beauty has infinite possibilities. But top-down political correctness has infected the arts, progressively cancelling aesthetics as it censors sensitive content to protect us from dissenting perspectives.

Those colonisers who came by sea suppressed the spiritual customs of the first inhabitants of lands they invaded, enforcing their own hypocritical religion. And 21st-century colonisers who bribe us with novelty – as algorithms achieve what once took muskets, booze and diseases – aspire to suppress our dwindling links to wild nature, undermine or redefine truth, and devalue beauty. So artists looking to prosper adopt the mindset of the coloniser, which puts public art on par with public health: an act staged in the service of corporate profit. Which reminds me…

For three weeks each spring, since 1997, crowds swarm the coastal walk between Tamarama and Bondi Beach – Gadigal–Bidjigal land – to see Sculpture by the Sea. And as visitors view the works, many shipped from abroad, and reflexively pause to take selfies, an Aboriginal rock carving by the path goes unnoticed. Millennia old, the carved whale and two fish arose in situ; wasn’t externally imposed like the brand-name objects that grow ever more disposable even as their market value soars, and few of which relate to the coast or its non-human denizens. The smartphone-jaded eyes of herded hordes miss the carving because it doesn’t pretend to be art, unlike works with reflective surfaces in which they can photograph themselves.

On day one of the latest SxS, a heavily made-up young woman stopped me to extract a ‘contribution’, though the show lined a public route. ‘You mean I have to pay to see it?’ I asked. No, she said, but to keep it free they needed donations. And out gushed a spiel, but her arrestingly sculpted eyebrows upstaged it. I’d rather swim from Tamarama to Bondi, dodging black gunk balls, than help fund production of predictable junk by PhDs who thrive as Western culture endorses hot air (in every sense) over aesthetics. Ever hotter air, climate change denial, misogyny and xenophobia, if Trump’s return reflects the hearts (and minds, such as they are) of US citizens motivated (or induced) to vote.

The measure of success for shows like SxS (or the Trump campaign) is scale and popularity, not quality of content. Instead of mass-produced art we get art produced for the masses: a shark emerging from a big banana, a giant stainless steel rocket ship – conceptually shallow phallic objects children reportedly liked (though signs warned the public such pieces couldn’t be touched, so any real fun for an actual or inner child was minimal). Yes, trust the West to waste not just depleting resources but as much space as money can buy. And to the extent that art is commodified, magic dies. Today, its market value, as subject to context (auction, museum, posh gallery, online platform), modifies – co-modifies – our response to it.

But if we ignore the price tag or hype or the rare lack of either, what value can a visual artwork have? Might it open our eyes to some overlooked aspect of reality – something beautiful, subtle, timeless, surprising, often hidden from sight?

Sculpture by the Sea: a zone where art is dying, to spawn a zillion selfies and illusions of cultural vibrancy. Each year the works (like campaign strategies) look more familiar yet suck folk in, and the same sculptors (or candidates) keep coming back with the same old schtick.

Walk south round a couple of headlands, though, and you find another kind of sculpture: carved marble Christs, angels, moping women in classical robes, crosses sprouting doves or flowers, draped urns, obelisks, cherubs and so on – forms and motifs produced by unknown stonemasons repeatedly, yet the genius of coastal weather and the diverse setting ensure that each acquires uniqueness with time instead of losing it.