Soft commodity cotton, and orange juice. Soft commodities have been known to adopt a backwardation trend until the late 1990s when futures were actively traded. Speculation and investment requirements later shaped the common contango trend. Soft commodity Soft commodities, or softs, are commodities such as coffee, cocoa, sugar, corn, wheat, soybean, fruit and livestock. The term generally refers to commodities that are grown, rather than mined; the latter (such as oil, copper and gold) are known as hard commodities. Soft commodities play a major part in the futures market. They are used by farmers wishing to lock-in the future prices of their
Commodity pathway diversion inherent market value. They reacted against this perceived commoditization of art by producing what they considered decommodified art. However, as Kopytoff argued, "commodities must be not only produced materially as things, but also culturally marked as being a certain kind of thing." Thus, when diverting industrial materials from their commodity pathways to produce art became culturally valuable, the objects themselves gained value (1985). Finally, pop artist Andy Warhol, created artwork couched in what Appadurai refers to as the "aesthetics of decontextualization." In his famous Campbell's Soup painting, Warhol diverts advertising from its commodity pathway by reproducing it as a work