BAGS — from the kangaroo to shopping stress. An exhibition on consumer behaviour, advertising strategy, greed, and ends that justify the means.
Art means creating awareness, provoking contradiction, pointing out problems, developing solutions. Art means intervening in individual and social processes and undertaking, again and again, the attempt at clarification — that is, taking a position. Only that content lifts art above cheap propaganda. Propaganda and product advertising do the opposite: no contradictions, no development of awareness, only the attempt to cover up facts, to offer simple solutions, to train us for a buying frenzy, to seduce us into thoughtlessness.
Common sense as personified by the corporation is of course male, likes to lecture women and conjures hair-raising role clichés out of the hat. We had almost grown used to the busybody in the corduroy jacket. For what feels like an eternity — in fact since 2007 — this schoolmasterly “common sense” has been sent to tell us what we ought to be thinking about while shopping.
The exhibition presents several exemplary positions demonstrating fundamentally different ways of handling the aesthetics of advertising. It was important to the curators to make visible the variety of media the artists use in reference to advertising, without being able, of course, to represent anything like the full range. The aim of the exhibition is to present a current theme in a number of representative facets.
Advertising influences art — and art teaches advertising to be afraid.
Not for children and young people under 16.