Art and commerce react to society in tandem. Both facets of visual culture transform as cultural touchstones flex and shift. While art persistently desires to provoke and comment on culture, some elements of consumerism take the opposite tack: they stoke the engines of what we buy, sell, and desire—they form the basis of the culture which is so widely challenged by fine arts.
Contemporary corporate and capitalist priorities persistently pervade millennial visual culture. With each passing year, the general desire to wear logos, buy brand names, and adhere to trends and their makers spreads farther and deeper within developed and developing countries. With this growing awareness of brands, logos, and markets, it is not surprising that art, once the standard means for cultural criticism, has been absorbed by the raging tide of the buying set.
Warhol shocked the art world with Brillo boxes and Campbell soup cans, and the ensuing Noachian deluge of Pop art forced down the barriers between art and commerce, blurring the lines between advertising and criticism of advertising. While art “finds its fulfillment just outside explanation” (James P. Werner), commerce finds its completion in the simplest forms of marketing and visual imagery.
Essentially, the modi operandi of art and commerce should be at odds. Yet somehow, more and more often, one becomes the other. Art is commerce in the eyes of Louis Vuitton collaborations with Richard Prince, Takashi Murakami, and Stephen Sprouse. Art is commerce when framed by Manolo Blahnik boots made in cooperation with Damien Hirst. And what is the meaning of BMW art cars? Since 1975, artists like Alexander Calder, Roy Lichtenstein, Frank Stella and Jeff Koons have designed symbiotic vehicles which straddle the worlds of fine art and that of an international motor works.
The 1960s saw the invention and proliferation of Pop, the 1970s saw an increasing display of logos and brand names, and the 2000s have been a messy and disappointing mix of both inclinations. Logos have “changed the substance” of clothing and accessories (Naomi Klein), and artists have changes the substance of logos. While brands have come to symbolize the retention of identity for some, they mark the end of the individual for others. Where does art fit in this spectrum?
These questions bring me to the work of emerging artist and established costume designer Jason Alper, whose show PROLETARIAN DRIFT AND THE ENFRACHISEMENT OF THE BURGEOISIE IN THE 21st CENTURY has just opened at Guy Hepner in West Hollywood. The exhibition includes eight works in which Alper foists contemporary consumer visual cues onto classic and well-loved paintings from the Western canon. The Mona Lisa wears the classic brown and tan Louis Vuitton printed logo fabric, while Magritte’s Son of Man wears the popular updated version in white. “I feel Louis Vuitton’s logo…emerged as an art form in itself,” Alper says.
While Alper intends his works to be irreverent and humorous, in actuality, they seem like probable truths. Corporate sponsorship of museums is already an important element in arts funding—are we so far off from draping Gainsborough’s Blue Boy in Burberry check? Alper’s wry examination of high art and mass culture provokes an exploration of the symptoms of contemporary consumerism and its ills. His paintings, though a touch contrived, are effective studies of authorship, commerce, inauthenticity, and the high-risk dangers of art mixed with marketing.
