At the altar of consumerism

First it was Murakami selling ladies handbags at the Brooklyn Museum. Now Chuck Close, Jeff Koons and a clutch of other 'brand-name' artists are hawking T-shirts.

Here are three more ideas categorized by economic strata for artists to strut:

For those strapped for cash:
- Artists monogrammed condoms (designed to be washable for reuse - c'mon, you cannot throw away something monogrammed by the artist you adore)

For those with a little to spend:
- Lipstick flavored with the taste of the artists favorite culinary dish (lipstick designed to be edible - even if one does not like the color, this way it can still be a part of you)

For those who do not know how to spend:
- Diamond engagement bands with laser etched artwork (of course, the diamonds must be conflict free)

Some of the reasons that ‘brand-name’ artist come up with to market their creations border on ridiculous. The handbag idea was hatched after the World Trade Center went down and was originally marketed with the premise that such a move will help New York(ers) get out of the prevailing 9/11 sadness (see blurb below).

From the New York Times: Still, nothing the company ever did hit the jackpot like Mr. Murakami’s cherry-ornamented and “Multico” bags, which came about, as Mr. Carcelle explained, after 9/11, when the Vuitton designer, Marc Jacobs, suggested to his corporate bosses that it was no good to mourn forever: fashion had a responsibility, ahem, to help people past their grief. “Marc said,” Mr. Carcelle recalled, ‘If I work with Takashi, and we do something colorful, I think it will help make New York strong again.’

Advertisement for T-shirts: Chuck Close (left) peddling his own design and curvy model on the right struts a Jeff Koons design

Two links on the use of data in art

Data is an essential component of our lives. We use it in myriad ways in social, economic and political analysis but is rarely seen as an input to creating art. Here are two instances where data is used in newer (and imaginative) ways to represent our contemporary situation (globally in the first case and locally in the second).

The website worldmapper features a collection of world maps, where territories are re-sized on each map according to the subject of interest. The categories (among others) range from income distribution, health indices and destruction ratios across the world. It is interesting to see how a picture can sum things up neatly.

In 7 out of the 12 regions more than half of the population live in households where the people live on below PPP (power parity) US$10 a day. In Central Africa 95% of households have workers earning this little; in Western Europe and Japan less than 1% of the population does.

Data again forms an essential aspect of Chris Jordan's art. He uses it to model our consumer oriented outlook and shock our sensibilities on the subject of consumption (not the drinking kind, but the kind that leads to profligacy and waste).

This series looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books.

Territory size shows the proportion of all people living on US$10 purchasing power parity or less a day worldwide, that live there (image ripped from the worldmapper site).

Plastic Cups, 2008, 60"x90", Depicts one million plastic cups, the number used on airline flights in the US every six hours. This is the detail of a very much larger image. (Image ripped from the artist's site)

Recycling after ourselves...

Jared Diamond, the author of Guns, Germs and Steel has an opinion piece in the Times today that elicits interesting albeit depressing scenarios on the nature of consumption. Link here.

Briefly, the argument runs as follows:

- Today, there are more than 6.5 billion people, and that number may grow to around 9 billion within this half-century.
- The average rates at which people consume resources (oil and metals), and produce wastes (plastics and greenhouse gases), are about 32 times higher in US, Europe, Japan and Australia than they are in the developing world.
- People who consume little want to enjoy the high-consumption lifestyle. Tens of millions of people in the developing world emigrate to the aforementioned countries seeking out the higher lifestyle (our family included).
- Among the developing countries seeking to better standards at home, China stands out. It has the world’s fastest growing economy, and there are 1.3 billion Chinese, 4 times the US population.
- Per capita consumption rates in China are still about 11 times below the US. If no other country increases its consumption and all national populations (including China’s) remain unchanged, just China’s catching up would roughly double world consumption rates.
- If India as well as China were to catch up, world consumption rates would triple. If the whole developing world were suddenly to catch up, world rates would increase eleven fold. It would be as if the world population ballooned to 72 billion people (retaining present consumption rates).

The developed countries lecture to the developing nations that a free market system will cure all that ails them… Yes, this is correct to a certain degree, but, promises of the free market economy coupled with unchecked consumption is just not sustainable (as can be inferred from the above argument). Of course, what is sustainable is to reduce waste, increase reuse and recycling across the board. Easier said than done… Jared does not make a strong case for it, but it is implied that only a concerted effort by national politicians across the globe will drive this new thinking down to the masses whereby it becomes more of ‘a way of living and thinking’ rather than grand one liners issued by politicians over the year.

Another resolution that I plan on undertaking – recycle as much as possible. The neighborhood where we live does not have strict guidelines enforcing the stipulated recycling of certain articles resulting in transgressions to the same as the homeowner deigns - resulting in irregular compliance. This partly explains our spotty record in this department. Hopefully, our resolve to help this year forces us to recycle more fully in the wake of this opinion piece.

Sunil, 'Learn Chinese - Have Opportunity', Digital photograph