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 am going to pretend for a moment that this post is about viral marketing, and the power of shameless self-promotion. And it does to some degree. Entertaining people goes a long way in the web marketing arena - it worked for Ze Frank, and many many countless others who share that sense of cynicism meets a dadaist sensibility that we, as postmoderns, find priceless.

However, I’m not really posting this video because I had a burning itch to say something intelligent about viral marketing or postmodern cynicism - I’m just a Tom Waits fan and my friend Adam sent me a link. I thought it was worth sharing with you, so I stuck it on my blog.

So, without further adieu…

I’m juvenile. The reason I say this is not because I want you to think less of me, but to warn you that while you may be able to extract an ounce of serious commentary from the content in this post, the side of me that still giggles at potty language is at the forefront of my motivation.

While browsing around various design sites, I came across a rather positive review on The DieLine of the latest packaging design from the San Francisco cleaning product company, Method.

Le Scrub and Lil’ Bowl Blu mark the company’s entrance into “deep cleaning” products and round out their line of bathroom products.

While I agree that there is a sleek and modern loveliness to these bathroom cleaning products, I at once had to snicker at the bare naked fact that the two depicted in the image above look very referential to a butt and an indeterminate colorectal organ shape.

The Tub Scrub product is probably the most hysterical as all I can see when I look at it is what appears to be an abstraction of a set of ass cheeks clenching a sponge. I can’t possibly be alone in this sentiment. And while the toilet bowl cleaner is more of a traditional shape for this sort of cleaning product, it’s smooth gentle curves are less “Clorox toilet bowl cleaner” and more digestive organ.

Of course, asses and bathrooms kind of go together, so maybe Method’s packaging design was deliberate…but probably not. I can’t picture a bunch of ad and design guys sitting around deciding to make their clients’ products look this anal…but what do I know? I’m a web designer, so my expertise seldom crosses into dealing with consumer products.

Of course this happens in web and print design as well. We’ve all designed something that was phallic, or contained a prominent undesirable shape of some sort. If you’re lucky someone catches it before you submit it to the client, or worse, release it into the world for all to giggle at….

A few weeks back, along with many others in the development community, I wrote in response to Microsoft’s announcement that IE8 would implement version targeting, a means of back-dating a site so that it doesn’t break with new releases of the browser.

While my views expressed in Version Targeting: Defaulting to the Past to Spite the Future? were primarily favorable of the new technique, I expressed my concerns with Microsoft’s decision that IE8 and all other browsers to come would default to rendering as if it were the previous release of the browser if the meta tag, which looks like this:

<meta http-equiv=”X-UA-Compatible” content=”IE=x;FF=x;OtherUA=x” />

was omitted, rather than in the current up to date standards mode. Perhaps the pressure of the masses in the standards community, Microsoft has caved and agreed that the default rendering engine of IE8 will now favor standards compliance rather than giving precedence to the fear of breakage. To quote their March 3rd press release:

Microsoft Corp. is now configuring the settings in Internet Explorer 8, the upcoming version of its browser, to render content — by default — using methods that give top priority to Web standards interoperability.

While their official position is that they have reoriented their company focus away from proprietary winner-take-all competitiveness and toward interoperability, a lot of us (those not so trusting), posit that they most likely just couldn’t stand up to the pressure coming from those aligned with the web standards movement.

Honestly, it doesn’t really matter what contributed most to their decision. Either way you look at it, progressive support for standards is a good thing. In the end, with IE8 now in public beta, it seems the IE team is finally looking forward like the rest of us, instead of shoving their proverbial heads up their own asses. Standards will be supported by default.

This week has brought an exciting new development in my life: I got accepted to the Studio Residency Program at Root Division, a nonprofit arts organization here in San Francisco’s Mission District. A few weeks ago, due to the urgings of friend and artist Deric Carner, I made the decision to apply to the program.

After speaking to the director on the phone about the application process, I quickly slapped together my portfolio, resume and finished updating my art portfolio website. That same afternoon I crossed my fingers and dropped off a folder containing evidence of my fine arts career to date. Anyway, to make a short story shorter, I interviewed and received notification 2 days ago that I got in. So I am officially going to have a studio space! I can barely contain myself, I’m so elated.

The program over at Root Division is great - you get a studio space at a much lower than market rent, and in exchange you just have to spend a few hours a month doing some sort of service for the organization. You can help with any number of things ranging from teaching community art classes to hanging exhibitions in their gallery space. In my case, they might also have me help out a bit with their website, since, as you know, this is my “thing.” I definitely consider the opportunity to be involved with the organization and spend some of my free time helping them out to be a perk rather than a burden.

As a studio resident, you also get the opportunity to show your work in their gallery, curate art exhibitions, and just be around the other studio artists in the program. Having gotten out of graduate school over 2 years ago, it’ll be great to interact with other working artists again on a day to day basis and be a part of the dialog.

So in addition to working full time on web design and development and running our company, I will be painting again and making other forms of art. It’s been a while since I’ve had a space to carry out my more involved art projects. I can’t wait to get started.