Commodity Self

            I do think we construct our identities through consumer products. We live in a very materialistic world where people want the newest and most expensive item. A lot of people judge people from the items they own or how they dress prior to speaking to them because of this. If a person drives a BMW or Lexus or is dressed in designer clothes, you would assume they have money based on the products they own. Some people buy expensive products that they can’t afford just to obtain an identity that comes off as being rich or high class. Products are advertised in a way that is meant to be appealing to everyone and make them think they cannot live without it. The products are portrayed as cool and hip to get the consumer to buy them and feel as if they aren’t cool if they don’t own it.

            We are products of products. A brand is no different than any other shirt or object if there is nobody representing it. People represent themselves and express themselves through clothing, accessories, cars, and the music they listen to. On the clothes and accessories you buy, there is a brand name, and when you wear it you are representing that brand. By doing this, you are helping to promote that brand and getting their name out there. You are a walking advertisement for that brand, and becoming identified with that brand. Brands can’t successfully exist without us buying the product and becoming the product by using or wearing it.

           

Wassily Kandinsky

            Wassily Kandinsky was born on December 16^th, 1866 in Moscow. He didn’t always start out as an abstract painter, but instead as a Docent of Law Faculty and later became a Professor of Law at Derpt University in Tartu. It wasn’t until he visited an exhibit that was displaying the different works of French expressionists that he decided to give up law all together for painting. He was inspired by K. Monet’s Haystack and Rihard Wagner’s Lohengrin. He entered the Munich Academy of Arts where he then he studied under Franz Stuck. It was there he met Gabriela Munter, an artist who he travelled throughout Europe with. He based most of his paintings on the landscapes and colors he saw and exhibitions they visited. Kandinsky kept most of his feelings and emotions inside and only let them show through his paintings. He is known as one of the first abstract painters.

            Kandinsky’s paintings vary from colors, styles and pictures depending on what city he was in and what time period it was. Most of his pictures are bright colors with dark backgrounds. A lot of his pictures don’t have people in them. His earlier work portrayed his fascination with colors when he was a child. He used his fascination for colors in his painting, “Looks on the Past”. Later on in his artwork, he incorporated music and melody in to his paintings to give them a sense of movement and harmony. Kandinsky published his book Concerning the Spiritual in Art in 1910 that demonstrated his geometrical progression in abstract art. These paintings included descending series of different circles, triangles, and squares.

            I chose Kandinsky because he was one of the first abstract painters and was believed to have started the rise in abstract paintings. I find his paintings beautiful because of all the bright colors. I like how there is a variety of paintings. He painted landscapes, people, shapes, and collages of random colors. He made his paintings more about feeling and movement instead of the overall picture. I found it very interesting too how he went from being a professor of law to being a painter, and just from seeing two paintings he decided to give up law and paint for the rest of his life.  Both of those professions just seem so opposite from each other.

Here are some of Kandinsky’s paintings:

 Murnau St.

Improvisation 19

Murnau - Kohlgruberstrass

All Saints 1

Farbstudie Quadrate

Works Cited:

Barnett, Vivian Endicott, et al. Kandinsky. Guggenheim Museum: New York, New York,

     2009.

Whitford, Frank. Kandinsky: Watercolours and Other Works on Paper. Thames and Hudson:

     New York, New York, 1999. 

Harrell Fletcher

            Harrell’s work is all about the community and portraying the personalities and stories of the people living in that community. In the Garage Sale series, he was able to do this by collecting items from different garage sales and putting them into his gallery. Each item contained a tag on them explaining the story behind the item from the previous owner. The story tag was a way for the people looking at the item to be able to get to know something about the person who owned that item. Having all these different items from garage sales with their stories showed the different cultures, lives, and personalities of the different members of the community. At the end of the gallery, Harrell made the gallery a garage sale by letting people buy the items. This connected the people of the community because with the item you got the story tag and knew the meaning and history behind what you were buying making it seem more valuable than a garage sale item.

            Harrell’s main idea behind the Garage Sale Series was to make art accessible to everyone. He achieved that buy using ordinary items we see every day and wouldn’t care about and giving them a special meaning behind them. It also showed that not all art is the fancy expensive paintings that we all see in museums. This is a reflection of community arts because he did it for the people of the community to portray the different lifestyles and personalities inside that community just by taking simple items from their garage sales.

Connection with Low Expectation and the Search for Community in an age of Alienation.

            Hal talked about how with the use of peep we have redefined our culture. Peep is just a definition for websites like Facebook and YouTube that are exploiting people’s lives for entertainment, personal benefit, communication, etc. This has changed our culture because now people are communicating online instead of in person. Our world has become a virtual world. People stay inside to play video games, watch TV, or surf the internet more than they go outside. If you want to look anything up or find a person you haven’t talked to or seen in a few years, you can just type that in to the computer and find it in seconds. Our generation now has become less dependent on the outside world and physical interactions that people alienate themselves in their houses.

            Hal also talked about how peep has redefined the word friend. He talked about how so many people have hundreds of friends on Facebook, but out of the hundreds you really only talk, hang out with, or know a select few. Why do you still friend request them then? People add these people usually to look at their profiles, to see what people have been up to, or to see what they are doing with their lives if they haven’t seen them in years. With their friends on Facebook, people have low expectations from them. You wouldn’t ever expect them to be there for you if you were going through a crisis like you would your best friend.  Hal talked about a woman who blogged about her life  because she felt like she could be herself with the people following her blog and was comfortable enough to share with them her stories, but in her normal day  to day life she didn’t feel that same way. A lot of people feel more comfortable being themselves around complete strangers or in a virtual world rather than the real world.

Double Standard

            There is a double standard with how woman are portrayed in fine arts and in advertisements.  When we see a naked woman in a painting, it represents beauty rather than sex, but if you were to see a woman in an ad naked or wearing minimal clothing it would represent sex. The reason why is because we associate fine arts with high class, value, and beauty. When you see a painting, you look at the colors, the details, and the naturalness of the woman rather than pay attention to her being naked. In most paintings, women aren’t portrayed the way that our society would view as beautiful. They don’t have tan skin or perfect proportions, but this is usually how a woman looks. The painter paints what they believe to be beautiful and what they think will catch the viewer’s eye.  Although in art, the woman in the painting is still being portrayed as an object of desire for the male buyer.
            Advertisement is basically based on sexuality and the idea of sex sells. Ads are more provocative than fine art. Perfume ads and commercials usually contain a male and female in some type of sexual situation, which has nothing to do with the perfume, but it is supposed to be seen as desirable. Ads are used to sell the product and to make buyer be able to picture themselves in that product. The best way of doing this is using attractive, skinny, tan people. If you were going to buy a skin product, you would want the person in the ad to have perfect skin. The women used in ads are usually exploited and used as objects to not only sell the product but also attract men. Most ads are geared towards a male dominated society. The women in the ads look in a way that is pleasing to men in order to get women to buy the products to look a certain way or for men to buy that product to be able to get that type of women. Women are seen as slutty rather than beautiful like they are in art.