Merchandizing Culture: Falling into the Gap
About 2 weeks ago, The Gap released it’s limited edition artist-designed t-shirt collection, featuring the likes of Chuck Close, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Ashley Bickerton, Kenny Scharf, Barbara Kruger, Kiki Smith, and several other past Whitney Biennial participants. I can’t say I’m suprised at this recent sellout by big name artists, and I’ve become too immune to this sort of marriage of main stream art and commercial fashion to be nauseous about it, but it still stings.
but I’m not the only one who is irritated with this grotesque display of commodification though. The subtly cynical tone of the LA Times article is one we can all appreciate:
The spring runways were an art fest with Marc Jacobs collaborating with Richard Prince on bags at Louis Vuitton, Dolce & Gabbana hand-painting tulle ball gowns, and Michael Kors taking inspiration from Van Gogh. And now, at last, the trend has arrived at the mall.
Like many of you, my idealistic notions of art prevents the existence of a Gap Chuck Close t-shirt from leaving anything shy of a bad taste in my mouth. It’s the sad reality of the commercial art world today. The avant-garde is so quickly swallowed up by the corporate machine, we rarely have time to see an artist mature anymore before they are propelled by the forces of the market into a state of being the next big art star…Of course, these folks have been art stars since the 1980′s so it’s not like they just recently fell into the fashion world. This just merely serves as a reminder to us that the corporate giants at the center of late capitalism are at the very core of art patronage.
Some Brief Slanty Background:
The corporate takeover of funding for the arts, though gradual, began to pick up momentum in the 1990s when The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), once the largest supporter of the arts in the US, came under scrutiny for supporting “morally objectionable” works. According to Wikipedia:
In 1996, Congress cut the NEA funding to US$99.5 million (almost in half) as a result of pressure from conservative groups, including the American Family Association, who criticized the agency for using tax dollars to fund highly controversial artists such as Robert Clark Young, Barbara Degenevieve, Andres Serrano, Robert Mapplethorpe, and the so-called “NEA Four.”
As our country becomes increasingly more conservative, and the moral majority dictates more and more of what can be done with government funding, the art world has had little choice but to embrace corporate sponsorship.
Some of the most prestigious collections around are held by the likes of Gap, Inc. and London advertising baron Charles Saatchi. Museum exhibitions are commonly funded by corporate sponsors, whose logos adorn banners and printed materials.
And one of the largest financial supporters of the arts in the United States is Altria Group, the umbrella company that owns Phillip Morris, Inc. – yes, THAT Altria Group – the largest manufacturer of tobacco in the world and one of the largest producers of alcohol. So Piss Christ is bad and cigarette money is okay? Yes, the conservatives are a moral bunch indeed….
The Cost of Selling Out
Artists have always had to be resourceful to make ends meet, and selling out is certainly nothing new. I don’t mean to belittle these artists for taking advantage of this opportunity to make a buck. None of us is above wanting to make money, and anyone who says otherwise is foolish. My problem with Gap t-shirts donning artists’ works and Takashi Murakami handbags is not the trending of individual artists’ works as fashion commodities, but rather the implications this has on the art world at large.
The commodification of contemporary art stars is problematic to the notion of cultural production, as it neutralizes the avant-garde, and muddies the contextual value of art production. So I urge you with caution to remember that the same machine that makes artists into commodities, also has the capacity to make impotent the meaning behind their works.
Some Further Related Reading:
Privatising Culture: Corporate Art Intervention since the 1980s by Chin-Tao Wu
Idiosyncratic Identities: Artists at the End of the Avant-Garde (Contemporary Artists & Their Critics) by Donald Kuspit
The Dialectic of Decadence: Between Advance and Decline in Art (Asthetics Today) by Donald Kuspit
Art Criticism(Volume 21, Number 2) : Administrativism and Its Discontents by Mark Van Proyen
“The Myth of Criticism in the 1980s,” by Howard Singerman
On May 28th, 2008, Charles Chadwick said:
The Barbara Krueger addition makes me sick. Isn’t her work supposedly a cynical comment against these sort of establishmentarian atrocities? Now her work embodies exactly the thing that it supposedly runs contrary to. It’s like Stephen Colbert actually becoming a real Republican. Blech!
On May 31st, 2008, Jeremy Anderson said:
Ah yes, this is the kind of discussion we need to be having. This kind of commodification will always feel a little like being kicked in belly, for me. It’s not easy to see a personal hero or a respected peer, get taken in (over) by the corporate marketing machine.
However, we all know this is nothing new. It is the constant, in the struggle to make meaningful art. While hate to perceive our heroes as fallen, it is this dynamic, between money and art, art and the public, that has been the constant challenge for artists. If it were not for this kind of dynamic, would we have such great works of art. Would we have Duchamp? Would we have Warhol? Would we have a particular ceiling, in a particular building, inhabited by a particular man in a particularly funny hat?
I think this is where art can become interesting, can become subversive, can become meaningful. I think it certainly did not, in this case.
The definition of selling out, is the moment you compromise the quality and respect for what you do, to make a buck. Sometimes this happens out of necessity and survival. Other times, it is something much palettable.
On June 2nd, 2008, Mark Hogan said:
I was walking past the Gap in Seattle and spotted the words “Whitney Biennial” and wondered what was going on. I wonder how many of the people that buy these clothes actually “get” it. Very few, I would guess.
I like the idea of using a Gap shirt as a platform for doing something subversive, but it seems like it would be difficult. Michelangelo was able to sneak hundreds of images of penises on to the Sistine Chapel ceiling, but it’s easier to hide something that is going to be viewed from the floor of a very tall room than it is to put it on the front of a men’s extra large t-shirt that is going to be stretched across some guy’s stomach three inches away in a crowded elevator.