“The medium is the message” – Shepard Fairey (Obey Giant)
Following the thread
I started researching the relationship between patron and sponsor by examining the Sponsorship show in L.A., beginning with an article in Slate. I followed by looking at the exhibition catalogue’s table of contents, the gallery, owned by BlkMrkt, a creative agency, the show’s curator Ryan McGinness, and another artist mentioned in the article, Shepard Fairey. I found a link on BlkMrkt’s web site leading to an article in the Washington Post on graffiti advertising, and did a search which led me to websites on guerilla marketing and the backlash against the corporate manipulation of street art. I also searched common areas for McGinness and Fairey, and found the Beautiful Losers exhibition, where I then saw Geoff McFetridge’s commissioned Nikes. More searching on McFetridge revealed his work with Pepsi for their Oneify campaign. While attempting to be methodical, I was also lucky to have stumbled upon such a tight-knit circle of artists who all work within the same universe and share similar attitudes towards artmaking, the potential conflicts of interest, and the marketing potential associated with their work. My blog postings have now come full circle: I began with an anlaysis of an exhibition about sponsorship; I explored the new attitude towards sponsorship espoused by the show’s curator and fellow artists; I now examine the appropriation of street art by corporate sponsors, and end with a look at what happens when sponsors embrace counterculture and bring it into the museum from the street.
The complexity of a sponsorship relationship is often underestimated. Even attempts to reduce the relationship to its most basic elements through parody do not guarantee transparency, as the Sponsorship exhibition demonstrated. Claims by leading contemporary artists of a new paradigm, where sponsor and artist are equals, rely on viewers sophisticated enough to separate the intent of the artist from the intent of the patron. The viewer may be capable of responding to the category of art-as-advertising as “fine art” if they are conscious of the relationship and its potential impact on the process and content.
For graffiti, sticker and stencil art, the question is thornier still. Media which provoke phenomenological response are especially appealing to advertisers, because they compete effectively in the contest for visual space. Penetration of the urban youth demographic is problematic because they are perceived as cynical and immune to traditional methods of advertising. By co-opting illegal street media, some advertisers merely appeal to the aesthetics of an unreachable audience, while others try to align themselves as counter-culture co-conspirators.
Overt advertising employing graffiti because it is representative of the target audience is easily recognizable as marketing. (See the work of Bronx artist Tats Cru for Coca Cola above.) Questions of intent are no more complex than those associated with the use of ‘fine art’ in advertising. Corporate-sponsored “100% legal” graffiti and “reverse stencil” (the artist creates the image by cleaning a dirty building) advertising sanitizes the outlaw marginality of street art.
Covert forms of guerilla marketing are more subtle, attempting to increase brand awareness while being mistaken for genuine graffiti. Advertisers aspire to the status of rebellious outsider to transmit their message, hoping to transform viewers into consumers, while risking potential backlash against their appropriation and corruption of the medium, as with Sony’s PSP campaign, pictured above. In street art the medium is subversive – in faux street art, the medium is subverted. Ultimately, the art itself is at risk, as the creeping insinuation of market-salient consumerism taints counterculture media, and it ceases to be effective as either advertising or art.
An even more subtle approach is the corporate-sponsored legitimization of street art by organizing museum exhibitions of graffiti and skate art, while ensuring pride of place for product placement. Nike is a major sponsor of the Beautiful Losers exhibition which included a limited edition shoe created for the company by artist Geoff McFetridge (of Oneify fame) titled “Vandal” (pictured below) which was designed with multiple layers of fabric which reveal a secret underlayer of patterned fabric as the shoe’s outer layer is damaged.
The exhibit examines the evolution of street, skate, punk and hip-hop art culture beginning with the “Roots and Influences” of Warhol, Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, and ending with contemporary artists including McFetridge, Ryan McGinness and Shepard Fairey. The art draws heavily on pop culture for its images, as did Warhol, but then again, Campbell’s was never a major sponsor.
Beautiful Losers will tour Asia and Australia in 2007