Art, Design and Consumer Culture.
We began the lecture by looking at this example:
http://www.arthistoryarchive.com/arthistory/feminist/images/BarbaraKruger-I-Shop-Therefore-I-Am-II-1987.jpg
Barbara Kruger made this piece of artwork that plays on the famous quote by Descartes, 'I think therefore I am'. It plays on the idea that consumerism defines us as a culture and we define ourselves by what we buy. However, in this society, we follow a cycle of: wanting, buying and then forgetting about it. Before the consumerism culture, religion was. Religion used to drive people and move people but now, money is the new religion and people follow this. Not working results in leisure activities and living for the weekend and buying luxuries that we don't need.
Values and activities have changed and this is apparent through media and shift in subcultures. Understanding culture is key to graphic design because we need to be aware of social aspects so that we can produce design that is relevant as well as contemporary.
Consumer culture is a desire to satisfy wanting. This is recognised as a bad way to live (in the western world) and is displayed in a beautiful way by Chris Jordan. This piece that he did was made out 78,000 plastic bottles and shows how much waste is created by our consumerism society. This amount of water bottles is equal to 1/10,000th of the estimated number of people in the world who lack access to safe drinking water.
http://www.chrisjordan.com/gallery/rtn2/#water-bottles
http://www.chrisjordan.com/gallery/rtn2/#water-bottles
http://www.chrisjordan.com/gallery/rtn2/#water-bottles
We then talked about aesthetic theory which questions what art is and what is beauty? These questions were posed by Theadore Adorne.
Graphic Design mixes fine art with social science and combines communication, technology, perception and behaviour. Design can't be understood without the communication system which links strongly with our social culture.
We were given a short quote by George Bernerd Shaw, 'The reasonable man adapts himself to the new world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man'. This means that we should be changing the world to fit our needs and this is how progress, in all aspects of life, happens.
Survival in the 21st century means:
Technology is advancing,
Advertising has dominated image,
Attitudes change,
Devices change us,
Digital immigrants and digital natives (digital immigrants are the older generation who have not grown up with this advanced technology, for example, mobiles. Digital natives are the younger generation who have been born into this technological age and don't have to adapt.
The western world is is a mixture of rich and poor, however, the virtual world is all online. Because there is two major worlds, online and western, that means everyone has 2 selfs: an online self and a physical self and these can be very different. Reality can be escaped through the online world as you can filter and alter what you say and choose to show about your life.
All of this comes from a natural human desire to communicate as we need to share information in order to survive. Human nature is driven by collecting, organising and sharing data.
This lecture was incredibly useful as it gave us a broader understanding of how society works and what society wants, with particular reference to the Western World. As a graphic designer, knowing your own society is key as you need to be able to sell to it which means working with needs and wants from the majority and keeping that in your mind for whatever work you do.
