Culture in a time of waste

Posted date: 13-04-2008

Posted by: Skinny Tiger

A lecture in three parts on and around the topics of consumption, brands and art, presented by the RSA.

Neil Boorman (Bonfire of the brands) began the evening with a spot of audience participation, he asked if anyone amongst us felt that they were unaffected by advertising and brand pulling power. A small amount of hands were stridently raised, one of these self-proclaimed "brand neutral" audience members was invited or possibly cajouled to the stage for a short exercise on unconscious advertising.

The premise of this short task was to establish if the participant was free of feeling and sentiment when viewing logos belonging to a some world leading brands. The participant was asked to write the first word that came into their head on a whiteboard, as the brands were shown words connected to the brand image of each company appeared on the board. The exercise had shown that even if we think we are not affected by brand image, we still find it easy to give the emotional response that the advertising has been feeding us.

It is true that city dwellers in our western society are subjected to some 3000 adverts during their working day. This has the effect of subconsciously conditioning an emotional response to a product or brand (exactly what the advertising is designed to do). This conditioning triggers thoughts and feelings when we visit shops and forms the basis of our eventual choice of product.

Neil took Lynx deodorant as a case in point. Levelled squarely at teenage boys, Lynx adverts seek to show that wearing the product will make you instantly sexually appealing to the opposite sex. Whilst in an adult reality we can see that this is a ludicrous suggestion, imagine the effect it has on an impressionable adolescent already worried about his self image because he does not wear the latest Nike trainers or use the most socially acceptable Sony Ericcson mobile phone.

It is exactly this type of advertising that Neil abhors, having been a fully paid up member of the brand club he self deprecates effortlessly about his former self reliance on brands to make him feel good about his life.

Since his awakening and atonement through setting all his branded possessions alight, he has made it his obligation to educate, through lectures such as these, the consumer, so that they may fight back against the ad agencies and their underhand tactics. A mission made all the more difficult by the observations of anthropologist Professor Danny Miller.

In two studies of the inhabitants of London, Danny has seen his expectations tested. It should be that people who are aware of the power of advertising, emotional responses and the evils of over-consumption, lead more meaningful lives and have more meaningful relationships than those who over consume, as they operate on a level free of materialism and individualism. But, his studies have shown the opposite. People who fully engage with emotional responses and follow them up with purchasing and consumption have meaningful relationships, have more friends and are on the whole happier with their lives.

An interesting observation, but my personal thoughts are that I require further classification on what a meaningful relationship is and of course what it means to be happy (a topic to large to get into now). More potent to me is the statistic that teenagers change their mobile phones on average every 17 months, could this same relationship pattern cause social ennui if it pervades into their personal lives and we see friends discarded when a new and more exciting model turns up.

Danny's lecture then changed tack to look at the role of consumption in the environment and how it gets lost within a myriad of factors when applied to climate change. He argued that consumption is the driving force behind climate change, it is precisely this singular factor that increases production, pollution and in some cases causes economic and environmental disasters.

He believes that governments should do far more to halt climate change by forcing citizens to stop consuming. I agree that it should be up to the government to lead from the front and not to just leave it to the electorate to choose whether they want to make a difference or not. But, I could only work with this if scientists were to be given the floor to explain the consequences and it was clear that the government did not profit out of the actions taken.

The final lecture was given by Michael Landy a YBAwhose work "Breakdown" found the artist cataloging all 7227 of his personal possessions and then destroying them using an (un)assembly line built inside the former C&A store on Oxford Street. His talk centred around his own experience of losing all of his "things" in the name of art.

Personally I found it quite an emotive action, I felt sadness for him when he said he had destroyed all of his photos, love letters and personal momentos. But, he is unaffected by it, his life has changed although he is still able to carry on doing what he did before, for me this shows with great clarity that possessions do not maketh the man. Many people lose their possessions through theft, fire or flood, these people carry on, rebuild and start again.

Maybe it is this fresh start that we all need, to shed our belongings, lose our materialism and build lives that have meaning based on love and worth instead of the pursuit of money, fame and power.