Research - First Semester

Watch this fascinating msnbc video called 'The picking game' showing children choosing branded fruits (even rocks) over chocolate muffins.

Our lives are entwined with brands. It has become difficult to distinguish between our beliefs and our brand preferences. From Apple to Starbucks, from Rachel Ray to Tiger Woods, corporations and individuals alike are immersed in a brand ethos. As a result, branding has become one of the most significant influences on both public consciousness and the contemporary visual environment and it is a fiercely debated subject.Brands embody allegiances, affiliations and identities, and they have become ambiguous totems: They allow us to connect with others and, at the same time, to differentiate ourselves from others. Critics such as the writer Naomi Klein, the de facto leader of the anti-branders, think that the brand mentality and everything it entails — the economics required to sustain it; the advertising necessary to propagate it — have an insidious influence on global society, the environment, and the quality of human life.

This is a new campaign to market baby carrots. Perhaps, farmers need to apply advertising techniques to their campaigns the same way as the retail and food industries. Can we be persuaded to choose healthy foods over junk food by selling alternative lifestyles, ideals and commercialism?  

Decoding Advertisements is a fascinating book by Judith Williamson. This book sets out not simply to criticize advertisements on the grounds of dishonesty and exploitation, but to examine in detail, through over a hundred illustrations, their undoubted attractiveness and appeal. The overt economic function of this appeal is to make us buy things. Williamson states in her introduction: "Advertisements are selling us something else besides consumer goods: in providing us with a structure in which we, and those goods, are interchangeable, they are selling us ourselves.
She contends that the first function of an ad is to create difference. Only goods which are essentially the same, such as cigarettes, beer, soap and perfume, need to be advertised. The way in which difference is created is by means of an image. However, an image is only of use in creating a difference insofar as it is itself part of a series of differences. She provides a compelling example of the processes which work to transfer meaning from one system of signification with which we are familiar (which she calls the referent system), to that of the product with which we are unfamiliar.
Is it possible that farmers could start using the same processes in advertising their products as e.g. beverage, cosmetics, car makers?


INSPIRING ARTISTS 
Jenny Saville

Jenny Saville’s paintings of obese women are shocking portrayals of the female form. Often at times her subjects seem bloodied, bruised and by far blow away the competition in contemporary figurative realism. Her paintings are highly inspirational. 

James Rosenquist

His work as a commercial artist painting billboards and signs was a feature of the advertisement hoardings that dominated the Times Square in New York. I like the dynamism in his imagery. He braves subverting the notion of the American dream, emphasizes on politics and social issues.

Nick Turvey's sculpture have been picked as part of the Fitzwilliam Museum Sculpture Promenade 2010 in Cambridge. The above is called Venus. Carved from a block of upholstery foam, and coated in a rubber skin. When you grab hold of those rolls of fat you find they are soft. The artist is using abstraction to trigger responses at a very personal level and claims that the reason for Venus was to explore a positive image of fatness.