short feature for artkrush’s “art and commerce” issue (#90)

published today!

http://www.artkrush.com/170607

Critiquing Capitalism

Art and commerce are ever more visibly intertwined; today’s savviest artists know that it pays to critique capitalism — and that getting paid can be its own critique. Andy Warhol paved the way in the ’60s, selling paintings of Campbell’s Soup cans and silk-screened Brillo boxes, “mass-produced” in his New York Factory. His Swedish contemporary Claes Oldenburg took a similar tack, building his career on monumental sculptures of mundane multiples, such as clothespins and tubes of lipstick.

Warhol and Oldenburg’s pop legacy begat enfant terrible Jeff Koons, who gained renown in the ’80s with Hoover vacuum cleaners encased in Plexiglas and liquor bottles cast from stainless steel. Still rendering the most banal of products high-gloss, Koons seduces serious collectors into paying a pretty penny for such “rarities” as the steel-cast pool inflatables and metal trashcans in his more recent Popeye series. Across the pond, Damien Hirst has always gone the extra mile: his 1992 installation Pharmacy commented on Western society’s penchant for prescriptions by recreating a drugstore stocked with colorful, empty canisters in the gallery space; Xu Zhen pulled a similar stunt at last year’s Art Basel Miami Beach, dutifully replicating a Chinese convenience store to sell packages, bottles, and boxes devoid of all content at their original asking price. Hirst’s latest claim to fame is a piece that literally puts a price on one’s head: a diamond-encrusted human skull that sold for $100 million.

Other well-known artists engage the mass market by collaborating with fashion brands looking to add some creative currency to their products. Chanel recently tapped installation artist Sylvie Fleury, whose works have featured scattered shoes and crushed makeup, to produce a piece inspired by its vintage 2.55 handbag; the final work is now being exhibited in a traveling art pavilion-cum-advertisement designed by Zaha Hadid. The success of his quirky Louis Vuitton purses made Japan’s Takashi Murakami a household name, and this February, veteran troublemaker Richard Prince unveiled his own line for the French fashion house. Prince first stirred up controversy nearly two decades ago when he rephotographed Marlboro ads to critique their depiction of a mythical American West. Many years Prince’s junior, Hank Willis Thomas echoes that appropriation by unbranding ads from the ’70s to expose their racial politics, or virtually imprinting corporate logos such as the Nike “Swoosh” onto black men as a visceral emblem of exploitation.

Barbara Kruger pioneered the strategic reuse of advertising’s vocabulary. Her eye-catching and oft-quoted Untitled (I shop therefore I am) lured viewers into contemplating the emptiness of excess. Bert Rodriguez takes a blatantly self-promotional tack — he plugs his own performances with billboards and sells gallery space to advertisers to prove that Advertising Works!. For this year’s Whitney Biennial, Fia Backström foregrounded Artforum’s commercial foundation by rearranging the internationally circulated magazine’s ads. Stringing similar images together, she revealed a publication governed as much by its commercial forms as by its editorial content.

Wim Delvoye derides the mercantile art market with his expansive Cloaca machines, which generate feces to be sold as sardonic objets. Mika Rottenberg is similarly fascinated by assembly-line logic; her video installations depict human laborers engaged in robotic production processes, all to proliferate meaningless items such as Tropical Breeze tissues. But where does this factory philosophy originate? Perhaps in the boardroom of Atelier Van Lieshout’s SlaveCity, where only the principles of rationality, efficiency, and profitability hold court.

-Sarah Kessler