BRANDING THE ARTS

Increasing options in one area narrows choices in others. The automobile that has increased the freedoms of drivers has reduced those of equestrians, pedestrians, and urban planners. The computer that multiplies information flows discourages three-dimensional contact. This relationship holds for culture as well as commerce. In both, an unprecedented quantity and variety of products is accompanied by an enclosure of the intellectual commons, and both result from the intellectual property rights embodied in trademarks, copyrights, and patents.

Constructing these rights for mechanical inventions and industrial processes has come with relative ease. They have arrived recently in historical terms, and they have often been linked to a single inventor. In this they differ from artistic genres, which seem always to have been with us. It is easier to think of Fulton’s steam engine than Cervantes’ novel, Guttenberg’s printing press than Homer’s epic. The radio is Marconi’s—or Tesla’s, depending on one’s ethnic loyalties; the airplane is the Wright Brothers’; the light bulb and phonograph, among others, are Edison’s. All represented new things under the sun, and they opened up new conceptual spaces.

This conceptualization permeates mass-produced goods. Objects once experienced as generic are now known by their brand name. Large batches of products are uniform in themselves but distinguishable from uniform batches of other brands—what the economists call monopolistic competition. Ivory Soap will look, smell and float the same at any point of purchase, and nowhere will it be confused with Lava or Zest, just as Pizza Huts in Aurora, Illinois or Mexico City will smell the same as each other, and different than a Domino’s. Soap and pizza exist as Platonic ideals, and they can be made at home, but most often the experiences of soap and pizza are mediated by a name brand.

Wine has both foreshadowed and reflected this expansion of material possibilities and restriction of mental space. Certain regions and estates have always been known for producing wines that stand up to given cheeses or pates, and in earlier times word of mouth and the occasional roving troubadour would have spread their reputations. A current owner of that estate, though, employs patented machines and products for fertilizing, harvesting, bottling and shipping his products. Thus able to ship large quantities of wine over great distances, he will generally want his product to be known as something other than wine, red wine, or vin de table. Consumers depend on this distinction as well. Both may well want to protect his appellation against pretenders. The legal status of Champagne in France is well known, like that of Parmegiano di Reggia in Italy.

Our current relationship with brand-names is wine, or wine and cheese, squared. With crackers. Ritz, Triscuits, and Wheat Thins are all crackers, as a given reader and a given writer are both persons. None is interchangeable.

This variety blurs old taxonomies and creates new ones. The human hunter-gatherer brain, co-evolved with generic fruits, nuts, roots, and game, was only gradually confronted with variations in crops or man-made goods. An ancient Greek encountered fewer in a lifetime than the average American does in a day. Most individuals can name their favorite brands in any product category, and these preferences are not necessarily linked with conspicuous consumption. Market researchers speak of “two-mustard” households; different brands, grades, and prices of the same product are designated for distinct purposes, and they are often known by brand name—such as French’s and Grey Poupon—rather than salad mustard and dijon. Their generic identity is transparent, and they are functionally separate. Grey Poupon seldom covers the chien chaud.

These peculiarities pose dilemmas of representation for works of “high” art, explicitly commercial works, and those in between. Television, constrained by sponsorship, shies away from the portrayal of brand-name items and includes them in dialogue only to the suggest degrees of prosperity or fashionability. Gucci and Porsche suggest wealth and, rightly or not, refinement. K-mart and Richard’s Wild Irish Rose signify gaucherie or outright poverty. Spectacularly unsuccessful cars, such as the Gremlin and Omni, signify the passé.

Depending on ticket sales and video rentals rather than sponsorship, film customarily uses brand-name items to further stylization or verisimilitude. The often-decried practice of product placement merely accentuates an existing tendency. A film’s credibility is strained slightly when characters drink only Budweiser, or Coors, but the credibility of many films would all but break if no beer-drinking character consumed either. (Contrarily, the substitution of generic for brand-name products contributed to the fantastic air of Repo Man.) Product placement succeeds only within a film’s ground rules of plausibility—the physics of its universe. An American welder will not sit down to a Campari and soda unless exposition redeems the detail, nor will a Frenchman bring Velveeta home with his baguette.

Product placement thus succeeds only when it is all but transparent, a small burden on the willing suspension of disbelief. We are used to bearing much greater ones. For instance, a man entering a city kills his father and later marries his mother, the queen, learning their identities only much later, and another man wanders among monsters in the Mediterranean for a decade before returning to his throne. In comparison, it is hardly far-fetched for a character to be seen eating Dunkin’ Donuts.

Such a detail offers the additional pleasure of validating experience. Seeing a familiar place on film produces a thrill of recognition, if not what Aristotle had in mind, and seeing familiar products can do the same. This is particularly true if the product does not dominate its category; viewers can identify with the underdog or the cognoscenti. An unsubtle if appreciative close-up of a Popeye’s Chicken box in the first scene of Larry Cohen’s cult film Warning Sign gives the protagonist’s reality a point tangent with our own. Otherwise, most have no other way to relate to a sheriff who faces the enraged zombies that result from biological warfare experiments gone awry. Spielberg’s better-known E.T. is “humanized” by his taste for Reese’s Pieces no less than his desire to go home.

Of course, this tactic faces constraints.  Reese’s Pieces could not have landed in the decolletages of Dangerous Liaisons, unless Mel Brooks directed. Archetypes and atemporal symbols make similarly poor endorsers. In The Seventh Seal, neither Death nor the Knight could have popped Skittles between moves in their chess game. (That this film and others are still available without product placement is fortunate but not inevitable. Footage has already been modified for commercials, and the digitized retrofitting of films to include products awaits the next Ted Turner—or the current one, if he gets restless.)

Painting, less subject than film to economics, has taken or left brand names. A bottle of Bass Ale in a still life is objectified, alongside generic fruits and flowers, by the artist’s gaze. An outdoor advertisement for Phillies likewise serves as a design element or evokes atmosphere, especially when the painting’s figures are inside. The viewer is not necessarily tempted to buy a cigar.

In fact, Warhol’s Coca-Cola bottles and Campbell’s Soup cans might actually discourage consumption, and not through their alleged statements about ubiquitous images. Instead, the acceptable if limited gustatory experience of both products is clouded by the thought of the stacked bottles, at once more garish and duller than their three-dimensional referents, and the flat red cans with their murkily unappetizing script. This lurid emphasis on the particular creates a pornography of the consumer good. Theory set aside, what remains is slumming.

Photography has found brand names thrust upon it as the surfaces it portrays are commercialized. Storefronts and automobiles are intrinsically commercial, and space itself is commodified in the shadow of billboards. In conversation, commercial outlets rather than churches, government buildings, and natural features are landmarks: one takes a left at the White Castle, then a right at the Mobil. Other businesses are integral to the character of a neighborhood; no barrio is complete without a Western Union office. To ignore these details is to engage in a kind of abstraction, or a metaphorical nude. Even the relatively wretched of the Earth consume mass-made rather than handcrafted items. For minority urban youth, brand-name items function as a network of appropriated symbols that is apparent if not intelligible to the outside observer. A large selection of portraits of young urban black men, in which none is wearing a Nike, Fila, or other conspicuously branded garment, is untruthful to its subject or involved in a self-conscious statement.

It is in literature—broadly defined— that the relationship between brand name and work of art becomes most problematic. Like television, literature has largely avoided direct reference to brand-name products. This stems in part from writers’ reluctance to shill for a corporate America that offers little in return. Many writers will use a brand name only when it comes to represent a whole category of products, such as xerox, kleenex, or spandex, and those without X’s such as Velcro or Caterpillar. In a culture that rewards commercial rather than literary achievement, fiction writers and poets can take a perverse pleasure in reading the gallant and futile ads in Writer’s Digest that plead for correct capitalization and trademark attribution.

Other writers use brand-name items only to indicate a time or place. Sylvia Plath, sensitive to the associations of American childhood with specific products—and well before Nick at Nite—invokes Ovaltine in “The Disquieting Muses.” More recently, Richard Price’s Newark young crack dealer Strike, in Clockers, soothes his ulcer with Yoo-Hoo, a chocolate milk drink marketed to children. Students of Canadian letters are apt to find a similar function performed by the Vachon snack cakes of Quebec, a small, quotidian sign of the division between Anglophone and Francophone.

The inclusion of brand names in literature is limited by sheer logistics as much as any other factor. Even the most expansive works cannot slow down to describe every detail of a scene, let alone every trademarked item. Homer could describe the essential features of every scene because wherever Odysseus sailed the sea was wine-dark. Numerous and minutely differentiated products, though, botch the process of description. A whole book could be spent in getting a character through a strip mall. If the nouvel roman were still being written, this could be attempted but, like the nouvel roman, the attempt would garner few non-academic readers. While a media theorist might argue that in the global economy the brand names are the protagonists and human characters append to them, this approach offers thin grist for the mill of art.

The exceptions to these wider rules occur largely in genre fiction, as in television, where brand names serve as shorthand for characters’ social and consumption levels. This tendency also characterizes “K-Mart realism,” written about but not read by the lower middle and lower classes (who are generally reading the works of fiction that can be purchased at K-Mart). The modesty of those characters’ circumstances is represented by low-end, mass-market consumption patterns.

This tactic, though, represents a cut-rate Faustian bargain. The writer obtains an economy of representation but forfeits the prospect of being read in fifty years without extensive footnotes. Anyone born after 1970 who reads Philip Roth’s story “Eli, the Fanatic” cannot be faulted for asking who, rather than what, Robert Hall was, and what that reference meant in postwar America.

This degree of economy, often desirable in the short story, is seldom necessary in the novel unless a character is preoccupied with brand names. The gloss provided by description of products and narration of characters’ responses to them might then outlive a product’s termination or a retail chain’s demise while continuing to address consumerism per se. In the right hands such a novel might prove funny and insightful, appealing to Knopf as well as Time-Warner audiences.

A more fruitful and durable—but still underutilized—approach is faux-naif description, as in Russian ostranie or the “Martian School” of English poets. Resuming the Edenic task and naming things for ourselves, readers and writers are forced to reassess what products are in a basic sense. Objectifying them allows reader and writer to explore, rather than accept, their meaning—a quintessentially literary undertaking. If a Cabbage Patch Doll or an Izod pullover is included in a story involving the 1980s, later generations will profit by a description of the physical qualities of those items and their social circumstances. Such descriptions further prevent false attribution of uniqueness. Reduced to their basic properties, many products are revealed as no more than epiphenomena of marketing and planned obsolescence, following and preceding other such epiphenomena.

A recent issue is the extent to which individuals emphatically associate themselves with products. Unlike cattle, who aren’t consulted, we pay to be branded, and we do so in part to signify our sophistication and income level, or at least our line of credit. This willing association with brands is nonetheless predicated on expectations of high quality or unique design. If Mercedes stalled out at every intersection, Christian Dior slacks unraveled in the washer, and Dom Perignon poured flat, snobs and social climbers would move on to other products.

High-ticket and high-quality items aside, consumers’ willingness to advertise is strangely, and strongly, bifurcated. Few would pay full price for a T-shirt or cap advertising an industrial item or another non-durable consumer good. As the exotic is a relative thing, foreign tourists have no trouble paying for a Caterpillar baseball cap as a souvenir of Peoria. Farmers and equipment dealers, forced to pay full price, though, would confine their collections to caps offered by competing suppliers such as Agco and John Deere. The term “gimme cap”—nearly a compound word, as in German practice—is firmly entrenched in American English.

Consumers’ reluctance to advertise that with which they do not feel intimately associated explains their ambivalence toward the Coca-Cola clothing line of the early 1990s. Although soft drinks, being ingested, are in one sense highly intimate, Coca-Cola is a victim of its own success; it is nearly impossible to identify with a ubiquitous product. In the competition of centrifugal and centripetal forces that has been called “jihad versus McWorld,” Coca-Cola offers few possibilities for tribal affiliation. Consumers will pay to advertise only if a brand name conveys an identity or affinity. Arch-rival Pepsi has avoided this difficulty through youth-oriented marketing that creates an identification, however contrived, and through proof-of-purchase discounts on promotional items.

Where identification is stronger, consumers pay handsomely. Harley-Davidson shops across the United States serve as clubhouses as well as places of business. Those who wear Harley T-shirts, bandannas, and other accessories signify a group affiliation and a system of values. There is also a willingness to share experience with in-group members, who may not have met but know each other at a glance. No soft drink will ever inspire an annual gathering of its devotees like that held by Harley aficionados in Sturgis, South Dakota. This pilgrimage, like any other, deserves both sociological and literary treatment.

Broader than the Harley-Davidson phenomenon, if not deeper, is the willingness to pay for identification with explicitly cultural products. T-shirts for recording artists, concert tours and even particular concerts are widely worn, particularly among deracinated working-class youth. Alienated from a society in which they hold little stake and less power, they replace ethnic or religious affiliation with musical identification. People who would not fly national flags wave banners for heavy-metal bands, and in American high schools affronts to musical tastes are fighting words. Judgments on singers and bands take up space in washroom stalls and wherever graffiti appears.

If brand names, like graffiti, have already filled most available space, the commercialization of time is still a work in progress. We once might have said only that we had a Coke and a Ballpark or Hebrew National hot dog at a sporting event; our visual and alimentary space was staked out by commercial interests. The flow of time, however, has now become enmeshed with commerce as well. We eat these concessions at a sponsored event where, as in broadcasting, time and experience have been purchased and commodified. All but one college football post-season bowl is labeled with corporate sponsorship, such as the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl. The one exception is the Rose Bowl, which has always been sponsored by the Tournament of Roses Committee—in effect, the merchants of Pasadena, who were ahead of their time. Concert tours, of profit-making popular performers or loss-leading genres such as ballet and classical music, are also subject to corporate sponsorship. Medicis with spreadsheets, the current wave of corporate sponsors wants to promote itself as well as the performance or event. Moments of our collective lives are, in effect, being sponsored like a broadcast. With the clairvoyance of fiction, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest is set in the Year of Depends.

This phenomenon has begun to penetrate individual as well as collective life. As landowners sell mineral rights, athletes have sold commercial rights to moments of their lives. For a time Superbowl winners declared their intention to go to Disneyland—a prospect that might have kept Alexander from weeping at the banks of the Indus.

As Svevo’s Zeno said of life in general, this development may be neither good nor bad, only original. As individuals we can only adjust to a new reality. Those who aren’t public figures will allow moments of their lives to be sponsored at a percentage of celebrity rates. Instead of wearing a sandwich board or handing out leaflets, we can announce our sponsorships at opportune moments. There is no telling whom we might sway with statements such as “It is time for the Safeway dinner.”