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
I don’t usually make films, and neither does my partner Jeremy, but something compelled us to dabble in a new medium. Despite our lack of experience, and our lack of time (we acted in, shot, edited and scored the whole bloody thing in a matter of 5 days), I was pretty impressed with what we were able to pull off. It’s short, ridiculous and not bad for being pieced together with iMovie and Garage Band.
