I'm recalling a post I made many years ago about clothing with logos on it. My feelings haven't changed on this point. Basically what it is when you buy clothing with a corporate logo on it is you paying them so you can be their billboard. It struck me as a bit ridiculous to have to pay for the privilege of doing their advertising for them. And this applies equally to high-end fashion labels and low-end brand names. It even applies to counterfeit merchandise pretending to be those things. It doesn't signify anything except that the people buying and wearing it have more money than sense or taste.
When I watched Exit Through the Gift Shop this was the message I got from it. Banksy made a film and then created the character Thierry to represent everything he hated about art and the art world. So much of art now is just a cynical regurgitation of advertising logos and slogans mass-produced into meaninglessness. Warhol probably thought it was hilarious whenever anybody took his work seriously. He made a lot of money out of it, but I believe that it was all one big joke to him right to the end. It was his big "fuck you" to branding and advertising. I don't even like Warhol's art, precisely because it was unoriginal and overproduced. Warhol made garbage and it was intentional. That was the point. And maybe when people hang his prints they're being unwittingly faithful to what he was trying to do. They're proving him right about us being a bunch of philistines.
Then again, perhaps that's what advertising and consumerism has turned us into, philistines who have no deeper understanding of the art we consume. We insist that everything be geared toward the lowest common denominator. It makes it easy for us to fit in because we like the same things everybody else likes. We don't like it when art demands something from us, and instead want it to be something we can take at face-value without having to think too hard about it. It's been hopelessly dumbed-down, and I'm not sure what the cure for that is. There is nothing so symbolic of this phenomenon for me as people who buy books for decoration and never read them.
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