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

One of the top graduate fine arts programs in the country, San Francisco Art Institute always puts on a hell of an MFA show. I’m not just saying this because I went there. It’s true. Sure, there are plenty of pieces I didn’t care for, as is the case with any large exhibition. By and large, however, SFAI puts out a good bunch, year after year. This year was no exception.

I didn’t make it to opening night on Friday May 16th - I was just getting over a nasty case of bronchitis, so the swarming crowds seemed a bit daunting - but I did check it out on Saturday afternoon, when the space was a bit less packed with bodies.

Some highlights from this years MFA Exhibition:

Robert Jackson Harrington’s insane sculptural installation - I love the futility of the piece because this elaborate contraption doesn’t do anything at all (as far as I can tell).

An impressive painting by Rives Granade

I can’t remember the name of this artist, but I did like this hell of a wall configuration with video monitors playing footage of 3d body innards. Maybe it’s because I’m a computer geek myself, but the body as an electronic network is utterly appealing.

Will Barclift’s performance (image scanned from the artist’s postcard) - Will presented a video of the performance at the exhibition. Also, as a side note, this treadmill featured here is actually mine. I left it at my old roommate when I moved 2 years ago.

There were a lot more great pieces in the show, but I was limited to the images I took on my iPhone that turned out , and those that I could scan from postcards I was compelled to pick up. I guess you’ll just have to go there and look yourself if you want to see more.

If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, the show is open daily from 11am-5pm until Saturday, May 24th at Herbst Pavilion in the Fort Mason Center. I highly recommend checking it out if you get the chance.

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….

I spend all day looking at typefaces, carefully considering which to use and where, how much space to give the letters, the words, and how to balance the visually artistic aspects of type with pragmatic legibility and order. You would think that come the weekend, enough is enough. Nope. My rental du jour on Sunday was Helvetica, a documentary about the most common typeface in probably the entire western world. And it was pretty damn good.

The timeliness of this documentary is perfect, and not only because helvetica reached it’s 50th birthday in 2007. As the film points out, we’ve entered into a period in history where the tools of design are accessible to the public and social networking sites like Myspace allow the user to create their own designed pages as a means of fabricating their own identity. Since everyone has become an amateur designer, what better time to cast an eye on the most prevalent font in the world? Read the rest of this entry »

I’m heading out to my magical hometown of Buffalo, NY today for holiday fun via Southwest Airlines. Upon printing out my e-ticket, I happened to notice a link to a section of their website providing information about their latest boarding procedures. The link took me to a sub-site of Southwest called “Boarding School,” which looked like this:

Sure, it’s cute - its faux notebook look and the fudged bic pen drawings of tickets and planes and stars are just….um…adorable….but obviously the designer didn’t have a broad demographic of travelers in mind. While a design like this would certainly be appropriate for a t-shirt company that distributes to Urban Outfitters, I’m not sure it’s the best communication design for an instructional sub-site of a major (albeit discount) airline.

I have never flown Southwest before. While I’m sure it will be fine (as in I probably won’t plummet to my untimely death over the Rockies), a boarding procedure site decorated in this juvenile manner threatens to wreck my confidence long before I ever board the damn plane. All I can say is I hope my boarding pass doesn’t look like this:

If it does, I’ll probably head on over to one of the other airline ticket desks and inquire about flying standby…..